Holga Photos of the campus

 I have not been using this Holga camera. I bought it used from Ebay, not from the usual sources (Freestyle or B&H). It stood out to me because the person who listed it on the auction site stated that he had modified it to give it a working f8/f11 option, since the usual Holgas have a switch for sunny and cloudy that is supposed to switch between those two apertures, but in actuality, the aperture stays the same. He also modified it to allow it to focus at closer distances. I was excited at those possibilities, but I didn't end up using them very much. The Holga was filed away for long periods of time, and I actually used my Holga Pan (the one that produces 6x12 panoramas) much more than this square Holga (6x6).

Well, I had a roll in it and wanted to see what it had. But first, I had to finish it off. I snapped off a few exposures from my visit to the South Coast Botanic Garden on April 16th. When I took it out, I was a little disappointed to see that it was a black and white roll, not a color roll. The reason is that for the last two exposures I tried to do closeups of a few very colorful roses at the garden. It turns out, the closeup option didn't work for me, I moved in too close and they came out blurry. Now I know, I can't get inches away from my subject with this Holga, I will probably have to settle for about a foot and a half.

Here are the photos I developed today. Most are of the campus where I work. The roll came out very heavily overexposed. It was my fault, the roll was HP5+ (400 ISO), and also, I was using no filter. Plus, I developed for 10 minutes since I was also developing a roll of JCH Streetpan Infrared photos, and if I don't push those rolls when I develop them, the negatives are extremely thin and almost unusable. So, I sacrificed the roll from the Holga to make sure I could get usable images from my Kraken 6x17. 

Note, I should emphasize that the negatives were "thick as a brick" to quote old Jethro Tull. They were basically unusable too, so I had to work with light curves and contrast to get something usable. Turns out, I think I did get something usable.

And these were the last two exposures on the roll, taken at the botanic garden. There was very bright sunlight, and the color was a very bright red. I moves the focus ring (or helical) all the way to the modified close focus, and got within inches. Turns out, wrong thing, the modified Holga can't focus that closely. It can focus maybe 1 or 2 feet away, but not inches away. Now I know.