Foray into Film
Recently, I acquired a new camera: a Holga 120N. The Holga is a very inexpensive medium format camera that takes 120 film, exposing either 6x4.5cm or 6x6cm frames. As Min mentioned, it is entirely plastic, including the lens. It is light leaky, has only two shutter speeds and apertures, it's fixed focal length, and mostly fixed focus. By all measures, it is an under performing camera. Its quality pales in comparison to my DSLR. But there is something magical about it. It goes soft at the edges, giving it a very nostalgic feel. It looks and feels like a toy, but is capable of producing serious art.
I got my first roll of film developed last week. The pictures are amazing. I am disappointed in the lab -- they seem to have gotten the processing right, but they cropped my prints and corrected my exposures (shots with the lens cap on should not be medium gray...it's not that light leaky). So I tried scanning the film in on my scanner. Above is one of the results. Pretty good, though a bit dusty.
I'm excited to get around to do shots of the major New York landmarks, especially bridges and subway stations. I'm sure Grand Central will get a visit too.
At 6:45 PM on March 4, 2008, Jeff said,
What do you do if the required exposure isn't anywhere close to 1/100 @ f/8? Switch film? Stick a ND filter on the front? Rig a strobe to the camera?
At 7:23 PM on March 4, 2008, Tyler said,
Yeah, that's a bit of an issue. There's a Bulb mode if it's sufficiently dark, but it'd be hard to keep the camera steady. They do make a shutter release cable for it that I'll probably get. I think this is where having some ISO100 and ISO1600 on hand would be useful. I have some ND gels that would be good enough if needed, and flashes can be used for dark, non-landscape scenes.
If all else fails, the lab should be able to make corrections in post, as they demonstrated for me, especially at this film size. For $25, it's hard to argue with, though.