Unfortunately, I don’t keep up with this as the work is created. It usually comes in bursts. Like this one.
None the less, I need to share some Holga shots with you. These were done by not fully advancing the film in between shots, allowing the exposures to overlap. Here are some of my favorites.
The class: Advanced Lighting Principles, which is basically code for an advanced photo class. It’s not a very precise or technical name for the course (meaning we’re not learning complex lighting diagrams or anything highly technical like that), but it’s still a great course to learn from and experience.
None the less, our first assignment is to shoot some fashion photos. No big deal right. Any photographer should learn to shoot some fashion. Take a girl, put some clothes on her (maybe) and go shoot somewhere. Well, that tends to be a bit more difficult when your exposures are anywhere from twenty seconds to 3 minutes. Using the pinhole camera, which the models we have are designed to use 4×5 film, have varying “focal lengths” (for lack of a better term”, which we just called the Super Wide, Wide, and Normal, with the normal being roughly equivalent to a 50mm lens on 35mm film. The downfall: well, your aperture is literally a pinhole. It’s rated f/125, f/250, and f/352 respectively, as the camera is literally a box with a tiny hole in it. Thus LOOOONG exposures to get adequate density on our black and white film. In short, the pinhole is a camera obscure – a box with a hole in it. Nothing more.
Besides the technical mumbo-jumbo, the camera was incredibly simple to use, obviously, as it has two modes, off and on. So, sit that puppy on a tripod, tell your model to hold perfectly still for 30-180 seconds and hope for the best (unless, of course, you’re going for some other effect; artists discretion here). I definitely liked working with the larger 4×5 negatives. The 35mm negatives were just way too small to print anything of respectable size with. The downfall of the pinhole, though sharper than I had anticipated it would be, lacks the sharpness that you would get from using a lens. My style craves sharpness and clarity, so when I was shooting and printing, I just took a deep breath, let my guard down, and embraced what makes this pinhole camera so unique.
This photo certainly shows of the quality of the pinhole camera that photographers seek with it: muted sharpness, dark circular vignetting, and intense, unpredictable sun-flares when shooting into the sun (the squickly lines of blobs of white). This is one of my favorite shots of the set, and is the epitome of a pinhole photograph.
The framing is a bit unpredictable with this camera since there is not a viewfinder, but helpful lines of approximate line-of-site is drawn on the tops and sides of the camera. Because of that, this shot is not perfectly centered or cropped to have the model fill the frame, but that is also part of the qualities of the pinhole, with also no help from me using the super-wide model. A bit of unpredictably with a bit of pointing the box in the right direction.
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Here, the vignetting is evident again, but also the dark skies are a quality of using a red-colored filter over the pinhole. The long exposure (here about 30 seconds) give a motion blur to the clouds also. Upon printing this, I really fell in love with how the sky turned out, but unfortunately, there was a smudge on the filter, which showed up in the print in the darkroom. I used a cropped version for my critique, but with the aide of a bit of Photoshop, the wider version is my final.
This shot was also purposely shot into the sun to gain the interesting and unpredictable effects from the pinhole camera, as well to show off the effects of using a red filter with black and white film – notice the dark skies. Without a filter, the entire sky would simply have been blown out, overexposing the negative beyond usable density range with the foreground. This was my first time using the red-colored filter with anything, and besides absorbing 2-f/stops of light, I’ll never shoot outdoors with out it.
The model here is slightly distorted. But that’s pretty understandable considering I was within 2 ft from here – yeah, 2 feet – as the Super Wide camera shoots about 170degs. The effects of the super wide are very unique, yet workable. I’m just glad it wasn’t like shooting with a fisheye and getting the almost unworkable distortion.
Final image: I took a risk with this one. I shot THROUGH the hole in the fence (as you can see). The risk was risking her head or face being blocked by one of the pieces of the fence, but I knew it would pay off if it worked (and it did). I took extra care to look from both behind the camera and from her perspective to make sure that the pinhole lined up to shoot through the hole in the fence, showing her as much as possible.
Again, in this shot, I was extremely close to the fence – literally within 2 inches of the metal – yet with the super wide, you get such a wide viewing angle with it.
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Closing arguments: The pinhole is pretty unique to use and would like to work with it again to exploit the softness and unique lens flaring. I just have to let go of my desire to completely control the situation and take what I can get. And that’s something I’ve been working on for the past couple of years.