Epic Holga

It's taken us a while to get here, but we made it, Holga Days is upon us.

In case you forgot, I took one photo each day in January with my Holga. Regardless of how it came out (perfect and fabulous or more along the lines of "what in the...," it's going here. I'm not even going to "crop and rotate" so the images are straight or do any fancy post production, just basics, like in photojournalism. Yep, that means there will be a lot of potential for failure, but really, how often do we learn from success? To aid in the learning, I'll included some technical specifications, like focal length, aperture, etc, because I think it's amusing. I'll leave out the rest of my thoughts on that considering the inspiration of this series.

In any case, thanks for the patience. I know the "Big Secret" project took up a lot of time and unless you are particularly drawn to abstract color representation, it was certainly an unusual flavor, especially the "cakes." So sit back, relax, and enjoy.

Now, for those of you new to my blog, it is possible that A) You have no idea the kind of crazy I am capable of and B) You are a little unsure on what exactly a Holga is.

So to clear things up, how about some book learnin' without the books. Already it sounds like a win-win for you techheads, though it is actually a little depressing when you think of a world without books, but I digress.

The Holga is a toy camera, made almost entirely out of plastic, including the lens, and most often is the result of a low quality of manufacturing. It's that low end production value that leads to all kinds of crazy: light leaks, natural vignetting, blur all of which are explicitly unique to each camera. So my camera is uniquely mine, and not just because of the rubber bands (it helps hold the back on and keeps the film from falling out).

Additionally, it has an extremely limited control including a whopping two apertures (Sunny and Cloudy/Flash though due to some manufacturing it's pretty much one aperture), descriptors for your focus from one, group of three, large group, to mountain, and it technically has two shutter speeds: Normal which I'm still not entirely sure what the actual speed is (again this can vary between cameras as well), and Bulb or open until you release the shutter. It also possesses a view port next to the lens, which means what you see may not be what you get. So as you can tell, it's not the most ideal camera to use when you really "have to" get the shot, but it's a fun little camera to work with and it's often surprising what the results are. Like I said earlier, sometimes it's fantastic and sometimes it's horrible, but isn't that the way it goes with any camera?

So here we go, as the Start¹ puts it, "I see you brought your dancing shoes, well lets see if you know how to use those things."

_{1 Shakedown if you're interested}