Late last year, a few of us in the local film-lovers group wanted to be a bit sociable and go on a photowalk together. Not just any old photowalk though – something a little different, more interesting.

So on a sunny Sunday morning in November, Mike, Simon and myself went on our first pinhole-camera photowalk. Sporting a couple of Holga 120 WPCs, a modified box-camera, a Holga 120CFN/ice-cube-tray hybrid, and a recently-hacked-together bi-directional oddity, we set off to the local park to go on a lensless wander.

 
Trees mostly caught our attention at first – leaves, twisting branches and winding paths make good starter subjects to settle into the idea of wielding a Massive Depth of-Field. The low-lying winter Sun meant we “had” to stop every few paces to take it all in.

In fact, we spent so long stopping to admire the light – and to set shots up, and take shots – that we managed to walk all of 100 yards in our first hour! Given we’d only set ourselves a two-how time-frame altogether, we decided to skip most of the route, and head straight to some old walled gardens.

l love photowalks. Not only for the chance to totally submerge yourself into a photo-taking mindset, but also to see how other photographers work. Everyone looks at the same place, the same scene, but with a different perspective – copying/borrowing/suggesting ideas really makes the day enjoyable and educational.

The challenge of a pinhole-specific walk is also great – often, the whole group is forced to show down (especially if you want to avoid wandering into the 120 WPC’s extensive field of view…). This can really push you to seek out of new ways to shot what you can see, rather than just keeping on wandering until you find something you obviously like the look of.

Here are some tips if you’re thinking of organising your own pinhole walk:

• Aim for one tripod per person – swapping them between cameras (including quiet-release mechanisms) can take up a lot of time.
• Plan a route in advance, but also plan some “shortcuts” in case time starts running out. A circular route can be handy.
• Bring a range of film if you’re not sure what the weather will be like.
• Start with a smaller group than a larger one – it’s easier to meet/change the route/swap ideas, etc. if you’re all trying to work out what’s going on at the same time.
• Just remember – the main point is to have fun! Better to cover less ground than to rush around and get dressed or last. (Although mobile/cell phones are a must – as is swapping numbers before you set off).

Finally, tag all your photos with something handy so everyone can see what you’ve been up to.

Been on your own pinhole-walk? Let us know!

Deep down I don’t think I ever wanted to put nude photographs of myself on the Internet and, due to a lack of volunteers to model for me, self-portraits were my only option. I hadn’t double exposed a film before either, except by mistake once or twice forgetting to wind the film on, so this month I decided to experiment more with this. By combining my usual landscape photography with some self-portraits I hoped to create unusual images and learn some new tricks.

I used two different cameras for this experiment, first I shot a roll of 35mm film through my Kodak Brownie (self-portraits at home) and then I reloaded the film into my underwater camera and went down to the River Bolin (landscapes).

Unfortunately, or fortunately, none of my self-portraits are visible in the following photographs, but I have instead some dream like images with just a faint hint to the double life of the film. The water acts as a softening filter for these landscapes and distorts the view further from ground level. I love the results from both these cameras individually, although the lack of controls makes double exposing film through them quite difficult!

Cameras used: Kodak Brownie 127 and Underwater 35mm.

Film used: 1 x Kodak E200 35mm (x-pro)

Locations: My house and the River Bollin, Cheshire.

Thinking that simpler = easier, I turned to my Ansco Shur Shot Jr, a box camera and the most basic camera I own.  After yanking off the springs that work the shutter (to create a B or Time mode), I found that the Jr’s lens (which is on the inside) is difficult to remove.  As in near-impossible.  I struggled a bit, then gave up and turned to my Ansco Shur Shot.  Great, I thought – this one already has a Time mode, I just have to get rid of the lens.  In the process of trying (and failing) to remove the lens on the Shur Shot’s faceplate, I remembered that the Shur Shot also has an equally well-attached lens on the film carrier.  Ugh… back to square one!

The Shur Shot has 2 lenses!

As I sat there, with pieces of both cameras on my dining table, it dawned on me… there might be a way to do this after all!  After a bit of tinkering, I frankensteined the two cameras.  Neither the faceplate nor the film carrier of the Jr had lenses, so I used those plus the body of the Shur Shot.  This also allowed me to have a Time mode and two different pinhole apertures!  As I used the Jr’s film carrier, I get eight 6×9 shots. I call this frankenstein the Pinsco.
More details on the making of the Pinsco can be found here.

The Pinsco!

The past several days have been the coldest of the season so far, with temperatures dipping below -15F and windchills below -30F (-26C and -34C, respectively)!  Lucky for you, I still have to take the dog for walks, so I managed to get some strategically timed (if not overly interesting) outdoor shots.  I was happy that seven of the eight frames turned out!  For next time, I know that I really need to keep this thing steady!

The captions under each photo are the notes I took for each shot.  I’m usually terrible about taking notes, so I taped a piece of paper on the side of the camera – worked like a charm!  This roll was Ilford HP4+ developed in Ilfotec DD-X at 125 (first time using the Ilfotec, too).  I think both the film and the developer have a wide latitude, which I credit for a big part of the success of this roll.

This is my first Pinsco shot ever – of a deserted, snowy park (taken while walking the dog).  This one was taken with the 2nd, bigger aperture, which is actually a thumbtack-hole more so than a pinhole.

2nd aperture; 35 sec; dusk after a sunny, snowy day

Pinsco 2: down the street from my apartment (also taken while letting the dog out)

1 ap; 25 sec; almost noon mostly overcast day

Pinsco 3: nighttime at the Blackbird Cafe, an awesome eatery just downstairs from my office.  Used the 2nd aperture on this one.

2 ap; 120 sec; night at blackbird

Pinsco 4: down the street from my office

1 ap; 25 sec; noon on snowy sunny day

Pinsco 5 was a 14 minute exposure of branches against the moon at night.  Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out.  Fortunately, I set up the shot then ran back inside and waited, so no appendages were lost in the taking of this nonexistent picture.

Pinsco 6: building across the street from my office – boring shot, but this one definitely turned out the best!

1 ap; 3 min; overcast afternoon

Pinsco 7: This was to be a night shot of the street lights and lit trees down the street from my apartment.  It looks like it might have turned out decently, except I accidentally double exposed the shot!  The second exposure is along the lines of Pinsco 8… oops!

1 ap; 6 min; night with streetlights in snow + accidental double exposure in my bathroom

Pinsco 8: Ever wonder what taking your glasses off, washing your hands and then putting your contacts in would look like as a long exposure pinhole shot?  Wonder no more, it looks something like this…

bathroom, contacts

This first roll was far from perfect, but I’m definitely excited about the Pinsco!  I’ve already loaded another roll and temperatures have warmed up a tad, so I’m already back to counting seconds – and working on keeping the Pinsco steady.

After reading through the manual and setting up the wooden box camera I got started with my DIY darkroom, which happened to be my bathroom as there are no windows so it was ideal! Assembling the box which was easy enough, then there was a black card lining to the box which fits inside. The last step was to make the hole and then put the paper into the box (in the dark room). Once it was all set up, I read up on the exposure times and special effects you can achieve with the pinhole camera.

The first set of images were taken inside, with low lighting. I used the guidelines from the instructions but they definitely weren’t exposed long enough as hardly any detail can be seen. I think I managed to over develop this set too! I initially tried to do some of the ‘ghost’ shots where your subject stands in the frame for half the exposure time, then move out of the way for the rest of it. Seen some really good examples of this online, unfortunately mine were just not exposed long enough to work here!

After the first set I decided to try my luck outside at night time. I also knew I needed to add much longer onto the suggested exposure times. I think these were about three/four minutes each. I wanted to try to capture some lighting and see how well the contrast worked, as almost every pinhole guide states how important it is. I didn’t use a tripod for these, I purposely moved around whilst the paper was exposed to see if I could get some interesting light effects/trails.

The third set were taken in the forest after we had snow, it looked very pretty when it was all settled. I wanted to try out the camera in natural sunlight too, and I think it’s worked in my favour as the details seem to be a little more defined on these three. With these I attempted a few different shots on each exposure, works well for giving an eery/spooky look.

My overall thoughts on this kit would be that it’s good fun but also a little tricky to get right. I enjoyed having a few attempts and will certainly be trying more once I get my hands on some more paper! I hope everyone else had fun with their cameras this month too!

According to Wikipedia, sun-print paper is made using a Potassium dichromate solution, so now you know. If you’re mildly chemical-minded, you can have a go at making it yourself. But otherwise, if you’re lazy or busy like me, then have a look round for “Tobar” paper.

The instructions say to a) place interesting and exciting objects on top of the paper, and b) expose to direct Sunlight for 1-2 minutes, before c) dunking in water for a couple of minutes. This I tried, with limited success (click any image to view larger):

Hmm.

It was time to work out how this stuff worked. Calling on AUTHENTIC darkroom techniques, I ran some stripped exposure tests, giving each strip 30 seconds more than the last. At least this proved the paper worked:

Stripped exposures

So what have we learned today? 1. Exposure times aren’t exact. 2. Don’t move anything once the exposure is under way. In fact, what I resort to now is to set everything up under a blanket to keep as much Sun off as possible. Once everything’s in place, I whip the blanket away and start the stopwatch.

A few more tests later and I’m starting to get the hang of this. The mash-up of solid shadow, penumbra, and transparent refractions holds a certain mysticism – is this the photographic equivalent of Plato’s Cave? Curves stretch outwards. Flowers bloom like explosions. Each object leaves its own trace, from paper cut-outs to enlarged negatives, to kitchen glasses and bits of food.

Success 1

Success 2

Success 3

There’s also a wonderful sense of texture in the finished item – the soaking and drying process leaves the paper more rigid, and crinkled. A small stack of results starts to resemble the rescued leaves of some ageing book – refreshing, after the virtual two-dimension-ness of browsing photos on screen.

After a while, one can start to look beyond the basics. This is, essentially, a much more tactile, hands-on form of “slow photography”, so interaction is everywhere. Some trials of scrunching up the paper before use, and laying objects across the crumbled surface yielded some encouraging results.

Pressed flowers and rice

Crumpled knitting needles

Crumpled, tea stained

Other things I want to try include curling the paper, origami techniques, maybe even burning through it. I love the idea of an image not just as a negative, or a digital copy, but as a thing in itself – a unique object that only reveals itself fully though touch and smell, as well as sight. Might have to order myself a new pack.

More Links:

Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes: the first lady photographer?
“Cyanotypes” Flickr group
“Sun printing” Flickr group

First things first. The image above was shot on my Holga, and I only manipulated digitally by way of turning it black & white and adding my copyright symbol. Otherwise, this is shown exactly as it was shot, with the image stretching its way across the film plain in a nice wide panoramic and covering the cogs right to the very edge of the film.

While there are other ladies such as Diana F+ (you’ll have to forgive me for bringing her up here on HOLGAblog…) that have masks meant to allow your image to spill over onto the film cogs or to expose a panoramic style short wide image, they don’t have a mask that will do both at once, and the cog exposure doesn’t quite make it to the edge of the film, leaving a small unexposed bar along the edge of each image. Being greedy and wanting to make a bigger, lovelier panoramic that included the cogs from edge to edge, I went to it by modifying my Jawz Holga to securely hold 35mm film. Yes, Holga does make a 35mm camera, but it doesn’t expose on the cogs (that I know of) – besides, I prefer the do-it-yourself method anyway!

First I made sure I had the square 12-exposure mask in my Holga. Using leftover 1/2-inch thick foam from a Pelican case, I cut a 1-inch by 1-inch square and hot-glued it into the bottom of the loading-roll side of the camera. I did the same on the top side, only I carved out a small indentation to hold the winder on top of the 35mm film canister. You don’t need anything else to hold the canister in place because the camera back presses against the canister itself, holding it there nice and tight. Then I used electrical tape to attach the leader to a 120 spool on the take-up side, making sure it lined up correctly with the canister so it stayed flush once I started winding the film. Before placing the back on the camera, I carefully covered the exposure-counter window with gaffers tape (electrical tape works as well, but might not stay on very well) so that it didn’t leak any light (well, any MORE light than my camera already leaked) onto my film.

The next task was to figure out how far I had to wind the spool between frames to make sure I wasn’t overlapping or wasting a lot of film between images. After some trial and error, I figured out the right amount. Using the front of the arrow on the winder, I turn it one and 1/4 turns (starting at 12:00, go around one full rotation, then keep going and stop at 9:00). That gave enough room to allow about 1/8-inch of space between frames, just enough to avoid overlapping but to allow the most number of images on each roll. In the end, I got about 24-26 shots per roll.

NOTE: Make sure when you aligning your subject in your viewfinder to consider the parallax-error between the finder and the lens, and also remember that you will not see anything from the top or the bottom of the field of view on the film, as 35mm film is not wide enough to reach the top or the bottom of the mask.

The nice thing about doing panoramics in a Holga in this fashion is that the film stretches across the ‘sweet spot’ where you’re most likely to get a sharper image – as we all know, Holga’s are renowned for their inconsistency when in comes to clarity and ‘perfection’. Give it a try! If you don’t like the results, rip out the foam and you can go right back to your 120 film without a problem.

You can check out some more of my panoramics at http://www.sheenairenephoto.com including cross-processed slide pano’s and other plastic endeavors.

Thanks for stopping by!

- Sheena

P.S. While writing this entry, I decided my next attempt will be exactly as above, but without the square mask to make an ultra super wide pano! I think it’ll take some work to get the film to stay taut, but I definitely think it’s worth a try!  Oh, I’m going to get on that with my new pretty purple Holga right away!

The Steps to making your own Holgaroid
First, you need to decide if you can permanently destroy a holga. If you are having troubles coming to terms with this, just remember that you will eventually be making your holga something better than it was. If you can’t bring yourself to wreck and rebuild one of yours, steal one from a friend.  Next you will need an old Polaroid back. The nice part is that you can use one from a hassleblad, Bronica, Pentax 67 or any other medium format back you can find. Don’t worry if the darkslide is missing, you won’t need it anyway! The important things are that the back seals and rollers are in working order. OK, so you have your Holga  and your back, now what? Well, here is a list of the tools that you will need to start your surgery:
•    A sharp utility knife
•    Gaffer’s tape
•    Either hot glue or an epoxy (hot glue is easier to work with)
•    A sharpie marker to trace out the cut lines on the Holga back
•    A pair of flat nosed pliers

Alright, so we have our tools. Now we start to cut, hack and of course, make sure that  we end this project with as many fingers that we started with.

Step one: Take off the Holga back. Inside, you usually see this:

We want it to look like this:

This is where the knife comes in. Take the blade and cut into the corners of the inside mask.  One you have all the corners cut, take the pliers and bend the sides of the mask until they separate from the camera.

Once you have all the inside plastic pieces out,  turn your attention to the viewfinder. Unfortunately with the holgaroid, you will lose the finder, but you can always add one on top , or just point the camera at the subject and guess. I find that to be way more fun anyway.
With the viewfinder, all you need to do is grab an edge with your pliers and pull or you can cut it off, too. This will usually leave the plastic finder rattling in the camera, but otherwise, it will do no damage. This finder needs to be removed so that the back can fit flat on the Holga.  Trust me, you won’t  miss it.

OK, with that gone, the camera itself is ready. Really. That is all you need to do to the camera body. I promise.
Now we’ll take the Holga back and the Polaroid back. Open the Polaroid back, remove the darkslide.  Use the ruby window on the Holga back as the center point and place the Polaroid back on the holga back.  Take your marker and trace the outline of the image opening of the Polaroid back onto the Holga back. Now you have the outline of where to cut. With the knife, cut out the shape out. Again, count your fingers so you know how many you started with.

Heat up your hot glue gun or mix your epoxy. Put a bead of glue on the Holga back, around the cut out shape and don’t be cheap with it either. We want it to stick and stick good. Take the opened Polaroid back and place it over the Holga back and press into place. Once it is on, add an extra bead of glue to fill any gaps between the backs.  Once this dries, take your glue and go around the outside edges, again, to make sure it sticks together well. Let the glued pieces sit to allow the glue to dry (about 10 minutes with hot glue and usually a few hours with epoxy). After it is dry, take the Gaffer’s tape and tape around the inside edges. This will make it pretty light tight.

So are you ready? Are you sure? OK……..
Take the new Holgaroid back and put it on the body. You will be able to use the original clips to keep the back in place.  That’s it. You’ve done it!

Now go and get some film.  You can use any Polaroid 100 AND Fuji’s 100 without doing any modifications to the back.
And remember, film leads to a holga, holga leads to photographs, photographs lead to instant,  instant to holgaroid and holgaroid leads you to the DARKSLIDE…. I am such a nerd….

Stop reading. Go and get some film already!

Check out some of my homemade holgaroid shots at : www.jimslobodian.com

Get tweeted at here: twitter

First off, if you haven’t seen Jim Elson‘s 15-minute Holga documentary called “Analogue Daydreams”, do yourself a favour and watch it. (Or see it embedded below.) It’s a great introduction to not just the Holga, but the mindset behind why we use Holgas and toy cameras generally.

For more documentary action, check out this short piece by Sahar Sarshar, and/or the Lomo Documentary that BBC ran a little while back.

And now for something completely different

There are a lot of slideshows out there, and a lot of instructional videos on how to use or hack your Holga, and I recommend searching around a bit for these (don’t worry, they’re easy to find) if you’re interested. For this article, I’ll focus on the more… “eclectic” videos around. You may have seen some or all of these before, in which case – time to get out there and do better?

The first two videos are great examples of capturing a Holga look on video. The first, by Wade Heninger, uses a Holga lens stuck to a Canon EOS 5D body:

The second video here admittedly isn’t a Holga (oh, the shame) but I can’t help posting it as the effect that Richard Koci Hernandez comes up with is so similar to the Holga shots that I love that… well, have a look. Scenes from a Vacation:

(via Multimedia Shooter)

For more examples of a Holga lens on a digital body, have a look at Rico‘s video of a Holga lens on a 30D.

Muybridged

I found a couple of videos using Holga shots as animation frames. At first I thought they must have been by the same person, but from what I can tell, each is from a different source.

Alexandre Paschoalini used 150 frames to make his HOLGA MOTION video:

And, to compare apples and oranges, Chaweemek used 7 and a half rolls of film to make his Holga stop-motion animation:

I love the widescreen formatting in these, and the scroll of the film numbers as you walk around. Update: For more Holga stop-motion, have a look at this old article too.

Miscellanea

If you’re working your way through the videos in this post, then here are some random videos to finish off with.

I know I said there are plenty of slideshows going around, but I liked the idea behind Streeteyes by Quinn Ryan Mattingly so much I decided to add it in. Former street kids in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, were given a Holga and a roll of film, took a double-exposure of themselves, and then went off round the streets to finish the film. The results, all in monochrome, paint a great “street portrait”:

Fans of the Mew Mew Holga will be amused to see it being tested on this weird lovable Japanese dog:

And if you’re thinking of organising a Holga exhibition some time soon, why not order the Polka band in sooner, rather than later?

To end where we began, I really enjoyed this documentary by Andrew Laker called The Street with No Name. It’s has some Holga shots in, but is all about how “No Name Street” got its (lack of) name.

That’s all for now. If you know of any more interesting ones, please leave a comment. And if you’ve been inspired and want to shoot a gritty, arthouse style Holgamentary with bullet-time and famous celebrities then… you know where to find us.