lo-fi toy

My lovely and talented girlfriend Tally of TalismanPHOTO surprised me this past Christmas with my first ever medium format camera. The Holga.

This one is made by lomography, so there are a few characterists in this Holga that the original one didn't have. It's got a tripod socket, a built-in flash with built-in colored gels.. Oh yeah, and it's bright red!

I suppose it'll be my little wink to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Next Christmas, I'm asking for a bedazzled Leica.

So I could use the Holga with my strobes, I modified it a bit and did a little testing:

• There's no hotshoe, so I'm using an optical slave to trigger my strobes. You can set the slave to trigger the lights directly, but since I'm also shooting with the 5dii, I am using the slave to trigger a pocket wizard which then triggers the lights. It makes sense in my head.
• This also means that the Holga flash will be firing. I like to have a bit more control of the light in my pictures than the Holga flash can guarantee, so I green-gaffer-taped three neutral density gels over the flash and tested each of the built-in color gels with a flash meter (took me a while to find it. It was in a box with some Beach Boys cassette tapes and an orange Nintendo Duck Hunt pistol). The red gel cast the weakest light (about f4 up close) which isn't enough to really affect the picture (the Holga's lens is f8, I think).

Yes, they make a Holga with a hotshoe. But not a RED Holga with a hotshoe.

I got a chance to test this out photographing Mike Walters. He's a musician/mad scientist who circuit bends toys and instruments to make wild sounds and thoroughly void the manufacturer's warranty. He calls his creations Mystery Circuits and he's sold a few to DEVO. I shot portraits with the 5dii, adjusted my lights for an f8 exposure chimping with my 'digital polariod', then I took a few with the Holga.

Here's the contact sheet.

This worked great. I love how there's no mask to keep the image away from the edge of the film.

Now I gots to get this scanned.