Benji

Back in 2006, I bought a Holgla from Amazon.com in order to experiment with Medium Format in a cheap and affordable way. I Suspect Lomography was really starting to come into popularity around this time but I was still oblivious to the term. I had already been shooting film on an old Spotmatic Pentax SLR.

Having grown up in the 80′s, I had been shooting film pretty much my whole life. There was always a cheap point and shoot film camera laying around or stuffed somewhere in a drawer in my house while growing up. However, even in 2006 (it’s n ot that long ago), a Medium Format camera cost a good deal. The holga was a compromise. It was a a ver cheap way to shoot larger film easily. Essentially it was a modern point and shoot Medium Format camera – An idea which intrigued me. This was what it was purportedly inteded to be anyway,

The Holga camera was designed by T. M. Lee in 1981, and first appeared outside China in 1982 with its appearance in Hong Kong. At the time, 120 rollfilm in black-and-white was the most widely available film in mainland China. The Holga was intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events.

The above quote is from the Holga entry on Wikipedia.

Above photo by D.a.r.i.u.s.

In any case, the Holga went on to become a Lomography icon, a so called toy camera. My first uses of the camera were with limited success. I believe here I might have misused the film mask, producing a sort of accidental Tripitch.

After I moved to New Zealand, and therby suffered from the more expensive costs of film and processing (not to mention scanning), My holga was used less and less. The Holga though continued to increase in polularity and I saw many instances of this on Flickr and the other photography sites.  Some time after, one post from a certain site got me excitted about moding my Holga to use regular 35mm film. I had a lot more fun with this and as 35mm was both cheaper to buy and get developed and scanned here, I decided to give it a try. Later I decided to buy an older second-hand scanner of my own since these as of lately had come down in price. Though the scanning process was somewhat time consuming, I was having more fun than I had had for a long time.

It felt good to experiment with film again. Since I had acquired a scanner I now decided to try some other film gear out. I had in the last year bought a Canon DSLR and had some lenses for that so I thought it’d be a nice idea to get a cheap Canon EOS Film SLR that I could swap lenses with. I bought an EOS 500n from the local online auction site for $20. It even had a new battery and a pack of film loaded.  I had a Sigma 17-35mm f/2.8-4 EX DG on hand. Now in Sigma-speak (EX means – this is our top line, while DG means Full-Frame). Since I’d only shot this lens on a cropped DSLR, I wanted to see what it looked like from a Full-frame Perspective. The scanned results:

I noticed how nice wide the dynamic range was compare to my Canon DSLR. With my DSLR, The above shot would have needed some kind of HDR treatment to get this kind clarity of exposure. Though I must state this was several years ago and my DSLR was an entry level model at that time…meaning DSLR’s sensors and imaging engines have only improved since then and the top-line models are getting more dynamic range all the time.

I was most surprised how wide 17mm really is on full-frame. I’d never shot that wide on film gear in the past (lenses wider that 24mm had not widely available back in the film days, at least not at an affordable price as I recall).

When the highlights do blow out, such as in the shot above, the do so gradually, giving a more realistic impression. This just reminds me of looking into a bright sky as opposed to looking into a nuclear holocaust, which is what I sometimes experienced with my DSLR at that time. The range of tones were also unique. Notice how the sun-filled clouds radiate warmth in their colours while the building structure which was in shadow has those cooler shades of winter. Perhaps the thing that could most convert me into a film only user if anything was the reds/orange/magenta colours in the above three shots. This is what impressed me most about this Fuji Reala roll I had shot. My DSLR just didn’t do reds like that. In the digital world, these colours are notorious for bleeding. Here they were crisp and just right somehow.

As for sharpness, there are pros and cons. The pro being that they did indeed appear sharper. The con being that if you weren’t careful on your exposure or used too high-speed of a film, grain quickly sets in. This film was ISO 100 yet in this shot was a good amount of grain produced, maybe because of those highlights challenging the shadows here? This also gets into a bit of our dynamic range benefit. Yes, film retains a lot of detail, but when you have to bring out the shadows more, you’re likely to get grain, though at small sizes and especially in prints isn’t that distracting, yet still noticeable.

What’s also interesting to me is that in guarding your exposures, Film and Digital are at polar opposites. In Digital, you must watch out for blow outs in the highlights. The highlights quickly and suddenly lose information (thus the Nuclear Holocaust POV I had mentioned previously). While in film, you had to guard the shadows. The shadows quickly lost information and just turned to grain and a loss of any detail at times. More light was better than less.

In Essence, In Film, watch out for the shadows, in Digital, watch out for the highlights.

Now this is turning into somewhat of an epic first post but I want to touch on one last thing aspect of this EOS 500n experiment. More pics first though. For these I used another affordable lens, namely the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II (or the so-called nifty fifty lens):

Now the thing I noticed about these and to a certain extent, the 17mm photos further above, was that they all had a certain of, what has now become known as for better or worse, Lomo-esque Quality. Perhaps that’s partially because they’re snapshots of insignificant objects or maybe it’s because they were not professionally processed nor professionally scanned or maybe the film was expired or in my camera bag waiting too long to get processed. All of these are possible and could contribute to that. However, because of the lenses involved (not expensive lenses by any means!), they also have a sense of versatility and avenues of possibility in the expression of creating art. Lets face it, a LCA camera isn’t magical some means of it’s own. It’s just a simplified tool and although it has it’s uses, like the Holga, those uses, mainly that of being focused on what you capture vs. how you capture it, potentially also have a downfall. Let me explain this way…

My brother who entered into the world of photography before I did once told me something which has stuck with me over the years. When I first picker up his SLR and expressed an interest in how to use it, he started explaining shutter, aperture, and film speeds, as well as the properties of slide film vs. negative, etc… I confessed that I had thought it was a lot simpler than this (After all hadn’t I been shooting on film P&S cameras for the whole of the 80′s). He didn’t really address that point. Instead he said something like, ‘I really like photography. I think one of the things that make it great is that it requires a certain balance of both art and science.’ This probably resonated with me because I played in a band and was really involved with the local music scene at the time and I believed the same thing about music. In fact, any art is a blend of science and/or technique and art. I had seen some really gifted musicians compose songs on old rusty acoustics missing two strings (I actually knew of a band that that only played their guitars with the first 4 strings on their guitars) and I had seen some musicians who did little obsess about gear and technology, as well as technique.  In the end, the ones who were successful seemed to have mastered a balance of these two. I believe that a tool, a good guitar or amp ,like a new lens, or camera,  are in fact essential to express your creativity. A new guitar or new camera are always the temptation of focus when you are running low on inspiration. Sometimes it works but you can’t count on it.

A lot of people have been inspired by Lomography, myself included. Though I also think that Lomography out started, at least in part, as a statement against gear obsessiveness. It showed that you could create art and that your photography could have soul and you didn’t need mainline, top-end gear to do so.

I honestly hope that I am not alone in recognizing the irony that Lomography in some circles (I would actually say the main circle) has now become about having certain gear. Maybe this is not the intent of the company selling these products, though the movement certainly was monetized. Their mission statement however reflects the original intent of the movement. In part, because Lomography has become so popularized and “trendy”, I want to let people know that they don’t need to necessarily save up for that Lomo LCA+ or buy a Holga in order to express their art. A cheap EOS SLR on ebay and a 50mm f/1.8 are also just tools of course and I’m not recommending you get those specifically either.  I guess what I’m trying to say is t hat you don’t have to own a certain gear in order to express your art or soul. Sometimes it helps your creatively certainly to try new gear. But then you need to fine the balance…the balance of your lust for new gear or certain gear versus the actual work it takes to get out there and use the tools available to you.

If you have money and it’s not hurting you, sure, buy gear! It’s after all helping those whose supply our art with the necessary tools. Just don’t get lost in the pure lust for those tools. There’s an interesting site called Tokyo Camera Style. It focuses mostly on film camera and shows off film camera users showing off their cameras. There’s an interesting quote on the site as well,

If you want to change your photographs, you need to change cameras. Changing cameras means that your photographs will change. A really good camera has something I suppose you might describe as its own distinctive aura.

– Nobuyoshi Araki

While I feel this is somewhat true, with both digital and/or film cameras, and believe me I have in time’s past, obsessed about gear more than most!, I still have say, buyer beware. How musch gear do you currently have? Have you used it to it’s advantage? Try challenging yourself with that gear sometimes instead of searching for the new must have camera. Actually, why not try challenging yourself with you current gear using the Lomography ten gold rules. And believe me, you don’t need official lomography equipment to do so. I always thought the most important rule (and the one that I’ve always tried to live by even before I heard of Lomography) was the final one:

Don’t worry about any rules.