Holga Blog

“Never do things by half”, goes the traditional wisdom. Unless you’re stepping into the world of diptychs – in which case, do everything by halves; it’s hard to do things any other way. The Golden Half (GH) by SuperHeadz is one way of doing so. I’ve had mine for about a year now, but wanted to write a small review here on Holgablog after all this time because I’ve finally started to spend some serious time with it.

When I first got my GH, I loved its small size and the feel of its slightly rubberised skin. Roughly the same size as the Diana Mini (which we looked at previously), the GH feels a bit sturdier than its Lomo counterpart. Those of larger finger-size might still find it a little fiddly to adjust the aperture and rewind the film, but you can always enlist a small nearby child to help out. Things are made slightly easier than on the Diana Mini in a couple of aspects – firstly loading a roll of 35mm film in is somehow as easy as putting bread in a toaster, and secondly the GH is fixed focus, so you only have to adjust the aperture ring for a shot (cloudy/sunny/flash).

In general, the results are as you’d expect from a “toy” camera like this – as you can probably see from the images here, results are clear but obviously not pin sharp, and nor is there much in the way of vignetting, etc. The GH does seem to handle light flare with some scythe-like relish though, and I’m pleased with a lot of the into-the-Sun shots I’ve taken.

In general, if you like cute things and were to buy a GH in one of its guises (including a Hello Kitty version), you won’t be disappointed. So apart from the size and the relative ease-of-use, why am I writing this?

Well, there’s clearly an economic argument for these tiny half-frame cameras – 72 images (or more, if you’re good) on a 36-piece film means you can click away twice as much for the same spend.

This is kind of how I started – mixing single shots with the odd moment for an odd attempt at a diptych. But getting the results back on CD, I found this pretty hasslesome. As labs expect full-frame shots, they generally pair up the half-frames for each print/scan. If you’re lucky and have taken an even number of single shots, the diptychs you planned line up with the lab scans. Otherwise, you do get the odd interesting, yet random, result where unexpected combinations crop up.

Being lazy and not wanting to scan too much in, I decided to see if I could get each lab scan to be a diptych, as planned, in its own right. This meant seeing each photo not as a single image when taking it, but as a pair of images instead. (Handy hint: on the GH, this means taking the right-hand image before the left-hand one if you want them to come out in the proper order.)

Once you start seeing the photo world this way, the “art” of the diptych starts to open up. I found the simplest method was obviously just to take two images that lined up. Subtle differences in where these overlap (or not), and the angle of the camera for each, make this an interesting take on a normal landscape-format shot.

Getting tricksier, you can start to get diptychs to “tell a story” – often by some kind of shared object between the two frames. This might be something that starts in one frame and ends in another, something that moves from one to the other between shots (people are good for this), or even just a shared background with different foregrounds.

Alternatively, you might just want to offer two views onto something – whether this is a cubist-approach to an object, different aspects of a person, or two viewpoints from the same position. This is the fun of diptychs – by using two images, you can invite viewers to contemplate transition and contrast. The gap between two frames, so to speak, is a world of imagination.

More information and examples:

20 amazing diptychs
Flickr Golden Half group
Flickr Diptychs group
Flickr Holga Diptych group