Walking in the Woods

One of my favorite pastimes...this one with a pinhole Holga and some old Fuji Acros 100 dunked in Caffenol for 9 minutes.

something I like about a cheap Holga....

is it mostly does what it wants.....

Subliminal Message....or maybe I just hit the jackpot?

Sometimes a photo just does as it wishes. 
Triple seven has many meanings and quite a few are religious.
Seven is seen as the perfect number that holds creation and the universe together.

Abo

I borrowed a Holga!

Strange but true....I went on a little road trip to Arizona some time ago and left my Holga at home! At home! Can you believe it? Well it happened, so I borrowed a Holga from a friend, because all my good friends have Holgas!

Superior Service

I could make all kinds of remarks about this photo...but I'll let you think about this one on your own. I will say that it's another one of my personal favorites.

eyes of a fish

Well, I bought this fish eye attachment gizmo for my cheapo Holga and have just started using it....jury is still out on whether I like it or not, but it might have some charm eventually. I think it will get more use with color film in the fall...

surfing the rift

sometimes titles have little or nothing to do with the photo.....
Holga with a surplus shed lens. Yeah, you can get cool lenses of all sorts for under five dollars each from Surplus Shed. If I had a lot of money, I'd probably spend all of it there.....

Holga at Dusk

Riding with the rotation of the Earth

a bit spotty

I need to work on this one....but I'm thinking of just doing a roll of nothing but photos of flags painted on buildings. We are a patriotic lot and Texans in particular seem to like their flag on things....

Bowl For Fun

Why else would you bowl?

Riding along....

Often I am the passenger and simply enjoy watching the scenery as it passes by.
Nine Dollar Holga, Fuji Acros in case you wondered.

Ripping the Sky

From the Cherry Blossom Holga, driving home in the rain...sometimes thing just work out.
Film in caffenol.

Not Nine Dollars

Theres's a new kid in town and it's name is Cherry Blossom. 

 As if there weren't already enough Holga models in the world, or at my house for that matter, this one caught my fancy and the press of a "buy it now" button made it much too easy to purchase.
I don't know how limited this edition is, but there is also a Mount Fuji model being made that is blue.
I selected this one mainly because it had a bird on it.
It's a standout pink, so there will be no sneaking around in stealth mode with this one.

While this was not nine dollars, it was modestly priced at 38. Still a bargain for medium format.
Pictures in a few days.....

Listening to Trees

Trees are marvelous things!
I could go all sappy and tell you how much they mean to me, but instead, just enjoy this Holga photo of some friends I found up in the Santa Fe National Forest yesterday near Jemez Springs.
The forest smelled of vanilla, which is a characteristic of Ponderosa Pines, shown in this photo.  
T-Max 100 sloshed in caffenol 

Just up the Road a bit.....

It's true! Route 66 is just about eight miles north of me. This particular spot has been the subject of many camera test shots over the years, and the place has rightly, or wrongly, depending on your point of view, changed over those years.

There used to be an old Model T parked here with some other derelict items...but time passes and things change. The current folks looking after the place have a retro vibe going on, but it's a bit squeaky clean for my taste and staged....

so be it, it's still a handy place to take a camera and fire off a few...Today's venture was with a new to me Holga 120S that I paid twenty dollars for with a birthmark of March 2001 as its QC tag indicated. Yes, I'm such a tart for Holgas!

film is Untrafine 100, (which looks and feels like Delta 100) sloshed around in caffenol for a bit over nine minutes.

I like the look...how about you?

Lunar Landing

It's been 50 years since we first landed....everyone that is anyone is talking about it...still.
I was just a wee one when it happened but I do remember watching it on the black and white TV set we had. 
Seems right to post this black and white shot from my Holga held up to the eyepiece of my telescope.
It's kind of grainy and a bit blurred...just like my memory of it all....

 

That Tree

There's a tree up the road a ways that Georgia O'Keeffe made famous by painting it...this is that tree. The Lawrence Tree.
I haven't been around here much. Call it doldrums or being in a slump or just plain jaded... there's also all this pollen and dust floating around that really gets to me this time of year, but that's not really any excuse.
I did jury a photo competition for Lightbox Photo Gallery last month and that was big fun. It was for the 10th annual toy camera show, and the photos submitted were really good! The show opening is this weekend in Astoria and it will be a good one!
The sheer talent that toy camera users have is over the top. It truly is about the person behind the lens and not the gear.
I've also been drilling some holes to make pinhole cameras out of cameras I have that don't work. A Dacora Digna is in the works.  It could be a Dig Pin or a Pin Dig....
Have a great summer...it's just around the bend and thanks always for stopping by. I'll put a fresh kettle of tea on for you!

More Road Trippin...

On the road to Hanksville, Utah. A road I never get tired of driving.
 

I've seen every mile at once....

1,565 miles, 5 tanks of gas, three states, countless turn arounds to make a photo, three herds of bison, four wild turkeys, two Cardinals, three Roadrunners, two tacos from a gas station (they were good) only one bag of Cheetos, a book store and a junk shop and a visit with Dad. I'm back home and tired but developing rolls of film anyway

Blue sky and red dirt roads

From the great plains area of Oklahoma...near the 100th meridian.
It's the kind of road where you see more cows and livestock than people...perfection in my book!

Fill N Chill

My kind of place....somewhere in North Texas on the way to Wichita Falls.

Marfa, Texas

Yes, it's Marfa, Texas. A place full of artists and some friends and old derelict phone cases and tin trailers. A photographer's happy kind of place...well for me it is.

Plastic Fantastic Show X

Hey Toy Camera Friends, click on the link below and check out this call for entry! Dust off your Holgas, Dianas, pinholes and other low-fi cameras and enter! 
It's gonna be fun!

Plastic Fantastic Show X

Ranch House Cafe

Ranch House Cafe in Tucumcari, NM
There's nothing much left of this place except the sign.  Every time I go to Tucumcari, I notice a few more signs have gone...go see them while you can before they all go away...
Get Your Kicks on Route 66

I'm Still Here...but not here

I've been on the road making a few Holga photos to put here later...so hang around and see. I mean the negatives are hanging to drip dry as I type...maybe some words and a photo or two manana......

the wee hours of morning...

The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

It's south of me about 2 hours, but during Spring and Fall migrations the birds coming and going fly right over my house. It's like bird TV!

My Heart Breaks...

Abandoned houses kind of break my heart...
There are many in the world and I can't help but stop and make photos of them when I come across one.
You see, I have a history with abandoned houses. One of the first home I remember living in, (west of Dayton, Texas on Hwy 90) was flooded during Hurricane Carla. I was almost six years old at the time and I remember Mom and Dad packing up some of our stuff and us leaving to go stay in a motel while the storm blew through, and boy did it blow! It ruined a lot of our things and floated the tiles off the floor. I remember my Mom saying she wouldn't live in a place that flooded, so my Dad bought another house and had it moved to a piece of property on the side of a hill.

Mom and Dad sold the Hurricane Carla house and the people that bought it used it to store hay in...it was never lived in again after we sold it and it eventually fell down due to disrepair and abandonment.

I loved that house. I learned to ride a bike there, shoot a pellet gun and started first grade there, plus my baby sister was born when we had that place. My Mom almost died there, but that's another story for another time. We had ducks, pigs and chickens and a couple of ornery Black angus cows that never stayed in the fenced in pasture. 

Oh, and we had 42 acres there with no trees...it was beside the railroad tracks and I used to watch the Amtrack train pass by at night and wonder about the people I could see inside the lit up cars.

The photo of the house above (near Amarillo, Texas) reminds me of that long gone place full of memories. 

I'll talk about the house on the side of the hill at another time... it has its own story of abandonment as well.

a little change up...

Taos.
Holga converted to pinhole...not the nine dollar one, but an earlier one that was fairly inexpensive as well.

Patterns, Colors, Textures in Texas

and a little hint of spring to come....
Kodak Ektar 100, which really does a good job in the Holga

Sky at Night

If you mount a Holga to a tracking mount and let it expose and follow the stars for twenty minutes, you get this.
The smear at the bottom are tree tops...The focus is a bit soft, but I'll try again and see if I can tighten this up...

James Dean was here...

it's true...this place in Marfa, Texas...
Sometime this spring I'm going to impersonate him...
Holga, Acros, Caffenol

Manhattan

Is that a light leak or radiation????

Timing is Everything!

The landscape was photo bombed by a horse.

on the ocassion I put 35mm film in the Holga and converted it to pinhole..

Well, it was inevitable wasn't it...that I would convert a perfectly happy 120S into a pinhole camera then make it use 35mm film.
I enjoy tinkering and using a dremel tool and drilling teeny holes in brass shimstock. And black tape...where would we be without black tape.
enough chatter...here's a little image I made with such a camera that I like...it has trees and the San Saba river water in it, so it's the jackpot!
Acros film dunked in caffenol...as it should be.

 

Delicious Hot Pickles

Hot pickles for 89 cents....how can you resist.
Another find in Socorro.

Would you know if you didn't know...

that this was a Holga shot? Sometimes I think this simple camera with no settings renders a scene a bit better than expected.
The falloff here is a good indicator of it's plastic lens...I like it. It's easy to keep in the truck and have at the ready for unexpected treasures such as the house in the woods above.

three Trees, three Lightpoles

If you use a Holga in its out of the box configuration, it will give you a 6 x 4.5 photo as above. Most people, myself included just toss the masking frame away and shoot 6 x 6.
With 6 x 4.5 you get 16 shots per roll and at 6 x 6 you get 12 shots.
Sometimes I like to use the camera the way it came...it's kind of a going back to the beginning feeling for me which I like a lot. And shooting in a rectangular format makes you think a bit more on composition since it's either landscape or not landscape.

From the vault...or two years ago....

It's not really from the vault, but it is from two years ago with another Holga I have had for a long time.
This place is no longer there, so I'm really glad I grabbed this photo when I did.
If you could imagine it in color, you would see it was orange and a certain shade of yellow...like Kodak yellow.
Yes! It was a quick photo finishing box, like the ones that used to be more prevalent and popular back in the days of analog glut.
Too bad it's gone! I would have liked to have it for a studio or tiny house.
Oh, it was in Socorro, but like I said, its' gone now except for the slab of cement it used to sit on.

My Kind of Place

The open road...this one is HWY 60 and it's my favorite. Route 66 gets all the "kicks" and publicity, but HWY 60 is a class act. Long, open range and if you are driving near Socorro and go west about 35 miles, you'll find the Very Large Array of radio telescopes.
Holga 120S and Tri-x...a good combo from the passenger seat....my preferred way to ride across the desert southwest.

Near Here

There are so many weird and interesting places around here...  This is ICE Station OTTO and it's about 25 miles from my house...
BTW-this photo was made with a Holga that was given to me at a recent film users group meeting. It's going on more adventures soon!

making the best of it

Not the prettiest picture, but if you cut off the end flap of a 120 film box and fold it just so then you can use it as a film tension-er under the take-up spool as shown below.

I use this little trick in all of my Holgas and it seems to help with avoiding "fat-rolls" which cause light leaks.
Some people use the little flap trick on the supply side as well. 
Newer Holgas have foam under where the film spools go as seen below. 

The foam works great until it doesn't. It notoriously comes loose and will wind itself into the film roll when you least expect it. Then you have a "fat-roll" problem of epic proportions. Not good and an absolute fail.

So if you have an older Holga, or a newer one, try the folded paper trick and see how you like it. 

Periodically I'll share some more of my tips for using the Holga. I really like the simplicity of the camera. Not worrying about settings gives me more time to think about composition.


 

it doesn't take much

A simple camera and a simple setting....

Just down the road a ways....

Just down the road is this place. Quarai . 
It's about 45 minutes away and a good spot to enjoy the day or test a nine dollar Holga.

I love a mess

Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, even if you don't know there's a flow that needs going with.....
Church in Taos with the nine dollar Holga and Shanghai film which bled numbers all over...They say you get what you pay for...but it wasn't the cheap camera in this case.

One Dog, One Vote

Found this down in Magdalena, NM. One dog, one vote.....
It's thing like this that really make me want to drive every back road in the state...
 

Oldie in Old Town

Since 1793, this has been a focus point of Old Town Albuquerque just off the plaza. The history is interesting and can be read about here. There seems to be a heavenly light leak in this one....

through the Window

This might be a cliche type of shot, I'm not sure, but I like trying to get a simple camera such as the Holga to perform a few notches above its capabilities. It takes a good convincing.