The Holga Page

The goal of this page is to cover some of the stuff I figured out while playing with a Holga 120s
It is a very cheap Medium format camera that has some very quirky effects. Basically the thing is so bad its good.

The Mods

These seem to be the standard mods. I found instructions for doing these on several websites.

• Cut the 6x45 mask down to 6*6
• Blocked the two screw holes that leak light inside the camera
• Painted the interior with flat black paint
• Tightened up the clips that hold the back on with pliers
• Removed the aperture arm
• Taped over aperture switch
• Made a cover for the film counter window

Additionally I scotch taped a little piece of paper to the top of the camera body which translates the distance icons on the lens barrel into distance in feet
At some point I need to scotch tape another label on the back of the camera. This one will say "Is the light good? Did you remember to focus?" I think that will help quite a bit.

Film and filters

• 400 speed black and white film. HP5 mostly
• Red filter used for some shots ( Cokin A.003)

Results

Shown below is a comparison using the filter. The red filter is on the left. Contrast is generally higher and the sky is almost black. One thing to watch out for here is that the red filter blocks a lot of light so if you try this when the sun isn't out you may wind up heavily underexposed. I'm not sure why the filtered image looks sharper. This could be a case of operator error but I doubt it. It could just be the effect of overexposure on HP5

Scanning and Printing

I scan my film with an Epson 4180 perfection scanner and then process the image in photoshop. While I try not to do any cropping sometimes it becomes inevitable due to myster vignetting in my Holga. For some reason I get one corner that is very dark. If all the corners were that dark it would be cool.

The View Finder

The view finder shows you considerably less than what the film will actually see.  This isn't a problem if you plan to crop the image.
In this image I filled the view finder with the sign. As you can see there are is a lot space around that sign that was not in the picture as I saw it. I also repeated this experiment with some white card and saw the same results, but they are less interesting to look at.
Point being in the future I'll try to bracket for composition, by taking the picture as it looks correct in view finder and then moving in a bit and taking a second shot


The other interesting feature of this picture is that I was focused at 3 feet and the lens distortion seems much worse then when focused further out which may be something worth exploiting.   This is an area for more research.

Mini Gallery

Here are some of my better Holga efforts.