Holga Blog

Name: Luke Healey
Location: Ames, Iowa USA
Hometown: Victor, Iowa USA
Current Gear: Hasselblad 503cx, Leica M2, Nikon digital stuff, and lots of toy cameras and non-toy cameras from the 1950s-1970s.
Favortite Film: Kodak Tri-X
Favorite Food: Chinese
Favorite Photographer(s): Walker Evans, Ralph Gibson, Weegee, Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, Diane Arbus… The regulars. I like studying what these people were bringing to the table so well. I believe most of us ‘Holga Photographers’ have a little bit of William Eggleston in us.

Luke Healey was born and has lived in Iowa his entire life. Raised in rural America in relative seclusion, he has been fascinated with the decaying relics of people who occupied the land prior to his existence. A fan of anything abnormal, he seeks out most things most people would ignore or find insignificant. He enjoys bringing these visions to a fixed state with his photography and hearing the same people who ignore such scenes voice their appreciation of the photographs.

His photography background is very fragmented but started at age six when he was given a Minolta 110 camera for his birthday. It took him four years to shoot one roll of film because he thought it was only for use on special occasions. Those occasions would turn out to be when he captured a leopard frog and kept it in a box in the garage and then later a private night spent with the family dog the night before his dad took him to the veterinarian to be put to sleep.

At age sixteen he had carefully crafted his high school schedule to include about three hours of study hall per day. One of the school’s teachers decided Luke needed something better to do with his time than play cards and gossip with his friends. She told him to make his way to the darkroom to learn how to print photos for the school’s yearbook. The darkroom was an old nurse’s station that measured 8×8 feet and contained a radiator and one window. The instructions for developing film and printing paper were written on a faded note card stuck to the wall. Proceeding with this minimal amount of information, Luke did indeed develop all of the film exposed by his classmates and made prints of every frame for use by the yearbook crew. Many hours were spent in this darkroom where he inhaled developers, stop bath, and fixer.

College was right around the corner and Luke still had zero working knowledge of camera usage. During his four years of college he was more concerned with making sure people were not taking photos of the things he was up to than with photography itself. During his senior year of college in 1999 he was using eBay to buy and resell items to pay his rent. One of the items he picked up cheap was an Argus c-four rangefinder camera. Taken back by its durability and beautiful simplicity as a machine, he held onto it. It was a metal fetish item to be stashed away for a later date.

Roundabout 2003, Luke purchased his first Sony point and shoot digital camera where he became a snapshot hobbyist with a machine gun shutter finger. A rare and fateful event happened in November, 2004 in that the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) were visible to the naked eye as far south as Iowa. Luke knew that he had to take this visual treat in with his camera and for the first time made the switch from green arrow to manual control. Once he figured out how to make thirty second exposures with the camera it was all over.

A crash course online to learn what ISO, shutter speed, and aperture meant revealed to him that he now had enough knowledge to operate any of the old cameras he had laying around the house. Armed initially with his trusty pocket camera, the Argus c-four, and a couple of Yashica Electro-35 cameras he’d bought at GoodWill, and a Kodak Brownie Rainbow 2c box camera from an estate sale, he was now off to the races. Learning so much, so quickly, it consumed most of his waking hours. Photography has been on his mind ever since. Luke enjoys collecting many types of cameras ranging from plastic toys to serious professional gear from the days of yore. He does not spend much money on modern digital equipment because he finds himself satisfied with film photography while it’s still a viable option.

Luke’s first Holga was purchased in 2005 thanks in part to his friends on flickr using them and revealing the intriguing nature of plastic lens photography. The Holga was truly a modern throwback to simpler times and he enjoyed the fact that it had a wide lens as it is his nature to photograph most things wider than normal. Along side his Holga, he was also sporting a converted flipped lens Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera which was copied from flickr’s own e50e’s camera. Both cameras are capable of the similar ethereal effects in photographs.

In 2006 Luke started developing and printing film and paper in his home. The rest has been a downward spiral into gear acquisition and continual skill building as a hobbyist photographer who secretly takes the hobby very seriously while trying to project a flippant outward personality towards his obsession. After burning through a lot of nicer cameras, he eventually settled into his two favorite camera kits, a Hasselblad V system for medium format and a Leica M system for 35mm film.

The rest as they say is interconnected history. Luke has burned up hundreds of feet of film and has several thousand frames of photo negatives collecting in piles around the house as well as binders when he feels pangs of organization guilt. Luke primarily presents his work as scanned images on flickr but likes to spend time printing in his darkroom. His intended goal is to hone his skills far enough to be seriously considered an artist or at least a technical craftsman who is credible enough to teach anybody that wants to sit down and listen to him.

My personal favorite Holga photo. I was guessing at the framing since I wear glasses. I was on my honeymoon and I'd been waiting forever to see these art deco sculptures in person at the Hoover dam

I think of Holgas as great cameras for storing memories. The vignetting draws your eye into the center of the frame to focus on the subject and gives the photo that dream-like appearance which all of our memories eventually fade to. Therefore I think it's good to snapshoot the things you love with cameras like this. This is a photo of my wife and a couple of our scooters

People use the term 'Happy Accident' to describe their unexpected results with the Holga. I happen to have a good example of that right here. I took this photo while I was driving my '54 Ford to my wedding. I was alone in the car driving down a gravel road and snapped the shot. The photo reveals the car and the weather which is what I wanted. However, I got the added prize of having my own reflection in the rear view mirror and the weird doubling up of the wooden moon ornament that hangs on my mirror. Some sort of optical flaw in the plastic lens. Truly a shot I'll enjoy looking at several years from now

Here's one of those lo-fi Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash photos. They're sort of a twisted cousin of the Holga. The edge of the frame is out of focus, but it's because it's a hyper macro focus. I'm sure you creative types could think of some neat compositions using this camera setup

As my photography skills improved my desire for bigger, better, sharper came to light. I bought a Yashica-A TLR camera and made some satisfying photos with it. This is an early one

I was still using 35mm cameras more often than medium format, however and managed to bring this shot home one evening. It's one of my favorites

I enjoy 35mm because it's portable. I always more open to see the most pleasing things when I'm not lugging around 30 pounds of medium format kit. This photo was made with a Graflex Graphic 35 rangefinder. This was a moment when I proved to myself that it doesn't matter how grainy your film is or how cheap your camera is, that you can get a pleasing image suitable for hanging right in your bathroom with almost any setup

However, you can still open up your mind and try to take in every little detail around yourself. Sometimes even when you are carrying the big kit around, the world presents itself to you in a way it wouldn't for most other people simply going about their day to day business. The ice giraffe was only about six inches tall, hiding in the back of an alley on a thawing winter afternoon

In my opinion, you don't need to be Ansel Adams to make art. Humans seem to be attracted to symetry, patterns, and sharp contrast. Sometimes very simple images tend to generate more interest than shots of busy compositions you take a long time studying

Though I rarely shoot color positive (or negative) film, I probably should do so more often since the results have typically been very nice and somewhat magical in terms of the colors. This is an example of slide film that I'm quite fond of. It could just be the impact of having your loved ones contained in the frame though

In more recent time, I have been shooting less often and with more intention than in the past. I study light and shadows. The photos I find the most satisfying most likely bore most people. I've begun to become obsessed with the technical aspects of proper exposure where I must not murder shadows or highlights. The result of some of my photos are pleasing to me technically, but rather boring in terms of telling a story, or addressing any sort of social commentary I'd like to mark my time on earth with

The big payoff for being a tech nerd is that I can pretty much envision what my film photos are going to turn out like before I even make the photo with the camera. This is a recent example of a photo I decided to go for when walking down an alley. I loved the textures present and the way the light was hitting them in a manner that was harsh yet pleasing. Where 'Happy Accidents' once had their place in my soul, I've gravitated to complete zen-like understanding of my equipment so I can control the process as much as possible and share my vision with all of you lovely people just the way I wanted to while I was standing there making the picture