Holga 120N - 100 Fuji Superia 120 film

Ahh me and Fuji we meet once more and yet again I've wound up with expired film - ahh the curse of my life with Fuji! I swear one day I'm going to buy Fuji film not expired :p Remember when I said I had a not-too-successful roll of colour put through my holga well yup this is it!

This time I didn't use the back plastic square backing you put into the camera and ended up with lots of light streaks (which I personally love) anyway just some food for thought, if you too are playing with a holga :)

(Taken outside at lollipop land!)

STATS

3 keeps 9 fails (ouch!)

Fail Reasons

3 underexposed inside shots, needed to like triple+ expose each frame to get somewhere near correct exposure! 4 horrid double exposure shots taken outside - gosh I was not on my double exposure game this roll, horrible clashing and down right bad shots, ha ha and finally 2 plain old boring shots *bows*

Things to remember

Don't shoot indoors unless you have lights or a tripod + the camera on bulb mode. Also this camera cannot do close ups so don't even think about it! I recommend at least 1 metre away from your subject at all time! (you've be warned)

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Holga 120n - 400 tmax film

So I already mentioned about pulling out my old holga, excited to be able to get 120 film developed relatively cheaply and easily - thanks lomography online! Since I hadn't pulled the camera out in eight years I also hadn't pulled out the film I brought to use with it - some Kodak 400 tmax that expired in 2008.

Now I'm hoping the results weren't determined by the expired film and how I'd mistreated it because that was a lengthy (totally unintentional) process I don't wish to repeat - I was smitten though with how the roll came back and I hope future non-expired rolls can deliver something similar :)

I'm not normally one to look at photos gleefully when they're underexposed (a problem that happens frequently with toy cameras on not super bright days) but something about the black and white, the lack of sharpness that you get with holgas, coupled with the mostly underexposed shots turned into something I really loved :)

Even though their is a perception about toy cameras being cheap (and admittedly my model was!) you have to be prepared to start forking out some coin here. The 120 film costs more than the 35mm film, the developing costs a fraction more and the most awful part is that instead of a glorious 36 shots coming back you get at most 12 (square shots) or 16 (rectangle shots) with the holgas. My model came with a black plastic insert that let's you change the sizes, I just happen to love the square format so I decided to lose 4 shots for it. Another thing is that holgas due to lack of exposure control leave you with the large possibility of some terrible shots so you could potentially find yourself being upset about wasted money/time/expectations :p

So my advice so far (I taken two rolls so I'm definitely no expert) is that b&w is the bomb but that could be because my colour roll came out horrid :p lol. Will blog about that one in the days to come :)

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Pink Dress - Kodak 400

I get to reminiscence with you guys back to the glory days of the Pink Superheadz which I affectionately referred to as the Pink Dress camera (actually it had those exact words printed on it :p)

I used Kodak 400 back in the day to because that's what my local shopping centre stocked :)

I also used to scan in the actual prints before I realised my printer could actually scan film - that was a fun discovery! I've come a long way :p Looking back at these photos makes me happy and I guess that's why I love photography it can capture feelings and emotions and it's fun to get to relive them. I remember being so excited about my pink dress camera, so excited of the possibilities ahead. I still feel that way I still feel like I have so much to learn and discover and that's exciting!

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Ultra Wide and Slim - lomography 100 film

Onto my favourite toy camera, the superheadz Ultra Wide and Slim :) I love this camera because it's sturdy, comes in amazing colours, is affordable and provides great saturated colours. I got my first one of these cameras on my 2011 trip to Japan I picked out the pink colour and used it excessively before tragically losing it to gosh knows where - I secretly hope someone found it, developed the pictures and is out there on facebook searching for it's owner :P  Anyway after that loss I wanted to experiment with different toy cameras so I got my Holga 135bc and my juice box but I still missed my superheadz so I eventually bought another one in gold :) The gold is shiney and really gold (awesome) but the pink was almost rubbery and I maybe even liked it better (although that may just be nostalgia talking)

The nice thing about this camera (as its name suggests) it's ultra wide meaning its lens captures a wider view than my other toy cameras with a focal length of 22mm (getting close to fish eyed wide!) without suffering any of the distortion

Like the juice box camera you have no control over the settings apart from your film choice which also means you can't do double exposures either but for what it is, it's awesome :)

STATS
11 keeps 27 fails
Fail reasons: close up shots, shooting into the light, indoors
Things to remember: you think I would had learnt all the fail reasons by now, but I'm not really posting the film in a chronological order (my excuse anyway!) 

Okay so the things I have to remember are; don't do close ups, don't shoot into the sun - toy camera don't make sun flares attractive (not from my experience anyway) they also need lots of light so don't even think about shooting indoors...okay got it! Next time I'll treat you better Ultra Wide and we'll have more success together :)

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Sunny Juice Box Camera - Lomography 100 Film

Okay this Lomography 100 film roll was recently put through my Sunny juice Camera so I have more of an idea of where things went wrong :)

STATS
12 keeps 23 fails
Fail Reasons
Shooting into the sun, the plastic lens doesn't handle that too attractively! Shooting indoors - what was I thinking! Fingers over the lens and trying to do close up shots

Things to remember : The fail reasons are pretty much no brainers, I obviously wasn't using my brain when taking them.  Maybe the problem with me and toy cameras - I'm so use to doing everything manually on my other cameras that when it comes to toy cameras and all I have to do is press a button I tend to just shut off- need to be a bit more diligent & always always have fun!

On a side note I see the light leak again, could it possibly be my cameras dodgey closure letting in light, eep I really hope so!

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Sunny juice Box Camera - Ektar 100 Film

Okay onto my second favourite toy camera my juice box! I love this camera, it has huge flaws in its design though, the shutter release button is actually the straw that you have to turn to release and then press down on - it's super flimsy and I never know if I'm going to break it or if I've turned it the right way :p  I can totally forgive that though because it looks like a juice box!!! Anyway else with me here?  It also produces really cool saturated pics seemingly regardless of film choice.

I also feel super stealthy whilst taking photos too like people are thinking I'm just having a sip on my popper :p

Now I have no idea about stats on this film roll as I wasn't as diligent back in the day with keeping track of performance and areas of improvements, I'm a bit OCD about it now just because I don't want to keep making the same mistakes :p. 

The top left photo is of me with the camera (thanks Ben) I actually still had dreadlocks then so you can tell it was a while ago! The top right photo is what I was taking photos of that day - Ben and the beach :) From memory that light streak is because I accidentally opened the back one day thinking there was no film in it, I love light streaks so I wish I could accidentally do that every time without totally wiping my film! The bottom right photo although awesome does have my big dirty finger smudge in the corner, another problem with this camera, because it's small the way I hold it causes my fingers to sit dangerously close to the shutter opening and because it doesn't have a protruding lens you often don't know you're doing it!

So I guess the things to remember are, don't break the straw, make sure your fingers are out of the way and like it says on it's box use on a sunny day! I think this last point will go for the majority of toy cameras, because you lack control over the exposure settings, in this case you can only control the film speed and thus you really need to shoot on sunny days to make sure your photos come out properly exposed! The sad thing about this camera is you can't do double exposures - once you press the shutter if won't let you press it again until you've advanced the film lever to the next frame...poop!

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Holga 135bc - Lomography 400 Film

Okay so we saw how the holga reacts with 100 film how about a slightly faster 400 film! Admittedly my not-so-favourite film speed but since toy cameras are so unpredictable anyway film speeds are the least of my concerns :P

Well I can say I tried to get too experimental here and bitterly failed!

 These above were one of few that made the good cut *gasp*

STATS

12 keeps 24 fails

Fails reasons: I tried to attempt a photo where you take a shot of a scene with you in it, you exit the scene and the same photo gets taken which should leave a cool looking ghost like appearance of yourself. These just didn't work. Either Ben has the most shakey hands ever or you really need to use a tripod when attempting something like that! even a shutter release cable would be great so your avoiding actually touching the camera and causing it to move! Other fail reasons included; taking food photography at night (with the flash) and being too close or not close enough :p cropped heads again, any sort of close up and finally ugly exposures :p

Things to remember: double exposures are hard, practise makes perfect! The camera just doesn't do close ups and the flash doesn't handle distance at night. To be fair the flash I have, probably isn't the most powerful thing (read: cheap) but I still think 1-2 metres would be wise for the future flash projects!

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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 :)

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