Sweet Holga Action

Since the horrible halt of the production of Polaroid film, & the fact that I burned through my top secret hoard of 600 Polaroid film, I've decided to start using my Holga as I would my Polaroid camera. All summer I've been shooting w/ the Holga, & at the end (I'm thinking Sept 1st will be the cut off & then I'll start fall!) I'm going to make a Blurb book w/ the images. The whole concept has become a really fun way to capture little snippets, through a vantage point only a Holga can muster, of my summer & the things I've seen & experienced.

For those who don't know what a Holga is, it's basically a plastic toy camera that takes medium format film. Its settings are extremely easy to use: flip the little slider to the picture of the sun if it's sunny out, flip it back to the little cloud if it's darker, rotate the "aperture" to the single figure for up close stuff, rotate it the group if your subject is farther away-very rudimentary & very fun to play with. You never know if there's going to be a light leak, or image blur, or crazy colors which you know weren't in the scene when you photographed it. But sometimes, only every once it a while, you'll get a pretty clear image in which it's very obvious & easy to discern what you've made an image from-go figure. :) I purchased a 35mm film adaptor for the camera, so I've been able to have the film processed locally. I then scan the film in & make digital copies of each frame. The whole process is fairly quick & allows me to touch up images as needed.

I'm excited to get my 'Summer 09' book published & then start working on my Fall 09 book. I'll upload the link on the side bar of this blog, so if anyone's interesting in seeing the final result you can follow the link to Blurb's virtual sneek peak of the book. I really love how these images are turning out-the aesthetic feel, how I'm relating my memories from the summer to each image, etc. So I may continue this Holga quest indefinitly-sounds like a good time to me!