Thoughts, etc. Results of a non-deterministic process

Holga set 2: Black and white

My second outing with the Holga gave a couple of really neat shots, but on the whole was not as successful as my first.  That's partly because I don't really have a lot of experience trying to visualize how a shot will look in black-and-white, and largely because it was my first attempt at manually controlling some of the exposure times.

This resulted in near complete whiteness on two of my 12 shots, and more darkness than expected on a few others.  I chose the black-and-white film partly because it was available and mostly because it was a rather wet weekend, with ever-present rain clouds and relatively low light.

I think the B&W film was the right choice, and I got a couple of really cool shots with it, but I also clearly have some learning to do with respect to both the medium and the camera. Should be fun!

Here's the complete set.

Lomography with my new Holga camera

My birthday was not too long ago, and for it Katie got me a Holga Lomography camera.  It uses large-format film to take high-quality picture with low-quality equipment; the body and lens are cheap plastic and the camera came with a roll of electrical tape to seal up light leaks!  Perhaps most interestingly, batteries are required only for the flash -- everything else involved in the picture-taking process is entirely mechanical.

Last weekend we went out around the neighbourhood, and I used up my first roll of this new-to-me film format.  I'd forgotten some of the things that go along with shooting film, such as worrying whether a shot is worth taking or if it will waste an exposure, and the lack of instantaneous feedback when you do decide to open the shutter.  I had the option to shoot the roll as sixteen 4.5x6 or twelve 6x6 photos, and I opted for the larger-format square variety.

I also taped up most of the seams on the camera, so there is much less light leakage than I've seen on some other people's shots online and in the Holga Lomography book The World Through a Plastic Lens, which came with the camera.

One of the fun features of a completely manual camera is that the lack of automatic winding makes it trivial to play with double exposures.  So far I've managed to only do this on purpose, and I find that it really makes me pay close attention to where subjects are within the frame in order to recall roughly how the first exposure was aligned when composing the second one.

The complete set of these shots can be found on Flickr.  I'm really looking forward to playing a whole lot more with this!