DC Flag

The Holga, she was behaving this day.

Steps

Thought I'd posted this one from Barcelona, but evidently not. So here it is...

Train in Spain

I realized there were a few images from Spain that never got posted, like this one of the train station in Barcelona, so there will be a few coming in coming days. 

OSH, 2

Another shot of the OSH on Sunset at Western. Off shortly to snowy points east (though still in the West), with the Holga, black-and-white and color film in hand. More to come.

OSH

Parking lot, Orchard Supply Hardware, Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue.

Looking Down Sunset

Sunset Boulevard, heading west, in Hollywood.

More Plams

I never really saw the appeal of the Palm as a tree - no shade, lots of maintenance - but visually they are very appealing (especially in black and white).

Dancing

I wandered onto an idle construction site not that long ago and came across this character.  Don't recall whether it looked like it was put there by the folks operating the site or by some happy tagger.

Campus

There's a very cool Modernist building on the campus of UCLA, and I liked the juxtaposition of the randomness of the tree in front with the order imposed by the windows and otherwise blank facade.  

Lost in the Supermarket

I was doing a quick shop a little while ago and tried something new.  Used the shopping cart to steady the camera in lieu of a tripod.  I was using Fuji 160 film, and next time might use something a bit faster, since I really had to fiddle with the balance of light and color with Photoshop (having the negs scanned now rather than printed after processing).  There were a few that worked well, but these are two I liked best.  Peppers a just sexy for some reason. 

Zoo Bridge

I was in Philadelphia earlier this summer and was able to indulge my interest in shooting bridges. This one is a railroad bridge running over the Schuylkill near the zoo.

Costco

Another from the archives.

Old Boats

The image looks I think like it was taken a century ago. The boat hasn't been there that long, but I do know it hasn't moved from the side of the house in years.

From the Archives

Here are a couple from 2006 - the one above from December, the lower one from August. I love the overpasses here in Los Angeles, there's something at once graceful and bleak about them. We spend so much time on the freeways, never moving as fast as we'd like but still too fast to really appreciate these things. I'd like one day to be able to walk around on an empty stretch - especially one where three or four bridges converge - and shoot, or even better to take the Holga up in a helicopter and look down on them (does it make sense to use such a cheap tool in such an expensive endeavor?).

Snow

It's hot and muggy in Los Angeles, and it's got me thinking of snow and Montana.

Feed Me

Boat for sale, Long Beach Island, New Jersey

The Shed

Back in Jersey. There's a little boating and fishing community in Barnegat Light, and whenever I go back I swing by and check out this little shack by the bay. Hate to keep harping on the focus/blur issue with this camera, but this is one that I think would have looked OK no matter how well the camera performed. Next time, will try and shoot it in color - lots of nice rust, peeling paint.

Summer Fun

I've found that the Holga treats water pretty well, I suppose in part because of the softness generated by the plastic lens. In this case, I was lucky the shutter kept up with the action, though a little blur would have probably worked out well, too.

Bayside, Jersey Shore

There are times when I can't decide whether to stomp on this plastic contraption or swear I'll never use another camera. For all the frustration it gives me - even on this roll, where some images I needed sharp are wobbly - I suppose the pleasure of the Holga is in never knowing what you'll get. There is something about conceiving an image and waiting, letting it take shape in your memory as you await the film to come back from processing, that's very satisfying. More satisfying, though in a different way, than the immediacy of the digital camera.

Crisp and Clear in DC

She was holding up for this roll in DC., this one shot just off the Mall.

What More Can You Ask?

A few weeks of travel here and there - both East and West coasts - resulted in a bunch of interesting stuff, so posting ought to be more frequent in the coming days (like to leave posts up a day or two to let them mellow before moving on...)

This is one of those favorite images. A glass lens might have yielded a sharper image, but for this image I'd rather have this rendering (and no, it's not flipped, just the way the wind was blowing).

Am in the process of adding some Holga-related links, but Blogger has been a little balky, so hope to have that together in the next few days.

Oh, You're Fickle

This first image was shot in Washington, D.C., on a recent trip. Crisp, clear, very un-Holga if you ask me. That said, it's a pleasant surprise. So what am I to think of the next image, shot days later with the same camera, same film type (Fuji Pro 160s) but a different roll? There are a couple black-and-white rolls still to come back from processing, and I'm anxious to see how they fared...

Surfers

Shot this a little over a year ago in La Jolla, before I got over the desire to economize and switched to shoot only 12-exposure (square) images. Another note: all the earlier images, that is those shot up until the last month, were scanned from either proofs or machine prints. I've since switched to having the negs scanned at the time of processing. Means a little photoshop work, but saves trees and means there's no dust from my scanner getting in the way...

An Old Favorite

Posted a while ago on the sister Los Angeles blog, I've always like the texture and motion the Holga captured on the ride home along Sunset Boulevard at dusk.

Light

Barcelona, April 2008.

Falling Down

I had cause to be over at the Freeman House in Hollywood, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's later projects now crumbling as a result of weather, material choices and earthquakes, and brought along the Holga. Have been getting the film back with a CD - the lab scans the negs rather than my scanning machine prints - and am finding they need a bit more work in Photoshop, a skill still developing.

Fiddling Around

Most everything I post here is pretty straightforward: I scan the print (or contact sheet, as the case may be) and post full frame images. I was noodling around, though, and was prompted to try stretching some of the Holga images in Photoshop. This one, shot at the Jersey Shore last summer, seemed ripe for pulling out from the original's square. Probably won't post a lot of these, like to play it straight, but thought the effect of adding to the distortion around the edges was a nice enhancement of the Holga's innate weaknesses (and appeal).

There's that Distortion....

There were about three shots on the roll of color film I shot in Spain that had some kind of strange light leak, just three. Have no idea what caused it, haven't seen it before or since. Here, the arc of light leached in as I shot the grate that covered a closed shop in Barcelona's Old City.

High Flyer

Sharp enough to pick up the footprints in the sand, the grassy ledge of the dune and even a bit of the houses in the background, but not enough to see the string holding the kite.

Sand Trap

This is one from a couple summers ago. Liked the texture of the sand, the shadow and the motion.

Back to Creepy

Most of the shots on this most recent trip were taken with the expectation that there would be distortion, blurring and all sorts of other Holga vagaries. Not so much. For the most part, the images were crisp - crisper than I'd seen in a while. And this with black and white film with an ISO of 50, really slow (color was 200 ISO, more appropriate). Then there was this detail photo from the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Dark, foreboding and blurred, it seemed to fit with the dreamlike quality of the building.

Blue Skies

There were plenty of wispy clouds in Barcelona earlier this month, and as always there was no expectation of how the Holga would render them. I was pretty lucky this trip, the camera managed to stay pretty steady and most of the images were sharp and clear.

Windswept

The texture of the images captured by the plastic lens remind me of photos from the early days of photography - they're soft and subtle and imprecise. This was taken in Cadaques, a small town in Spain about an hour and a half north of Barcelona that was home to Salvador Dali. The little red and white thing attached to the pole in the foreground was a piece of cloth or tape that was blowing in the wind. I'd hoped the SUV that appears to be cresting the hill would appear more imposing, but it still works for me.

The Crawl

The beach offers a lot of opportunity with the Holga - the softness of the sand and water coupled with the soft focus of the plastic lens. This horseshoe crab was scampering across the beach in front of me and, since they are usually only on the beach in their deceased state, I was lucky to capture it.

First Out

So what to lead with? There was a color shot taken early on that made me fall back in love with the texture of film, a richness that the Holga was able to capture far better (at least without Photoshop skills much better than my own) than a digital SLR. But most of the stuff I've shot has been in black and white, and the L.A. images are at the other site, so I start off with this one, taken in late December 2007 in Big Sky, Montana.

SOP

I've been shooting images with a Holga for the last two years, many of them posted over at Random Images, a Los Angeles-centric photo blog. Because I limited that one geographically, there are a lot of images taken elsewhere in the States and abroad that languish in a drawer. And so I thought I'd air them out a bit. There will be some overlap between the two sites, but the differences will be great enough that this site will stay pretty fresh.