135bc Holga - Ektar 100

We're moving onto the toy cameras now, which in some ways are my favourite and in other ways make me want to cry with their unpredictable nature :p I picked up the 135bc holga because I wanted a cheap holga that took 35mm film, my other holga which takes medium format film was a pain in the arse to find processing for.   Luckily processing is much more available especially in the online world than it was in 2005, so I definitely want to get back into playing around with my old holga! but anyways I digress!

The 135bc is the cheapest holga you can get it's all plastic and the "bc" bit just means it has forced vignetting (vin-yet-ing) so instead of the black edges occurring naturally on the film the 135bc has black inserts to stop the corners being exposed. Some people might find this cheating or tacky but I'm all for it :p

STATS

14 keeps - 12 Fails (+10 never exposed)

Fails Reasons

I tried googling to see why 10 frames never exposed I thought maybe I had left the cap on and the shutter had clicked in my bag but then I read this guy's suggestion about never putting in a roll of 36 exposure because there is too much film being wound onto the spool and could cause you to break your camera. Maybe it just didn't wind on? Mystery ... next time I'm going to stick with 24 exposure film just in case it was the 36 roll issue!

The other reasons for the fails were that people's heads were cut off - the view finder doesn't accurately describe what will translate onto the film.  I also found myself with lots of underexposed shots - this camera needs lots of light! It does have two nifty features for helping the light situation, firstly, you can change the shutter speed to "b" which basically means as long as you are holding the shutter release button down it will stay open thus letting in lots of light but also may result in blurry pictures unless you are using a tripod! The second is that some toy cameras won't let you take more than one exposure once you hit the shutter relase button but the holga 135 will, which means you can take heaps of exposures on one frame equalling lots of light! The photos above I took in Singapore - for the overcast days I used triple exposure and even on the fairly sunny day I still used double exposure (the lilly pads bottom right)

Things to remember: Aim high when shooting to avoid cutting off people's heads! Use 24 exposure rolls and only use on super sunny days( I'd even double exposure on super sunny days!)  Finally  make sure what setting you're on, if you're on the bulb 'b' setting and you just want to be on the normal 'n' setting this could mean a lot of your photos come out blurry - depending on how long that finger of yours lingers on the shutter release button. I'm actually still not 100% in love with holgas I find they produce soft images but if you're aware of this you can definitely use it to your advantage! I also have a flash for my holga which I'll talk about later as it's an add on I love and would recommend :)