I was going gangbusters on my old storefront project, and I was planning on continuing with it in my native Buenos Aires, where the same phenomenon of old, distinctive, non-chain commerce being razed to the ground and replaced by stores and buildings that look like any place in the world is also taking place. But here I ran into a problem: in Buenos Aires oldest and narrowest streets (likeliest to have the oldest stores in the land), the Holga 135BC put me too close to the storefronts themselves, and I had to literally stand on the street (putting my life at certain risk!) or deal with trees on the sidewalks, making it impossible to get the shot. The first week of August in Astoria, Oregon, where it was fogged-in and overcast. Holga 135BC, Lomography Color Negative 400 film. The maritime hardware store is still very much in business.

While I can see the obvious benefits of 120 film over 35mm in the image quality even the Holga gave me, I don’t have any real yearning to buy any medium format camera. Not yet. Although I remember saying that about all film cameras not too long ago. As the name suggests, the Holga 120N takes 120 medium format film. Before you load your film, you can choose whether you want to be taking 6×6 photographs with it or 6×4.5 simply by loading the appropriate film mask – a piece of plastic that sits between the film and shutter mechanism. If you were around for the early days of the platform when you could only upload square images and people actually used their native retro-effect filters, you can probably connect the dots yourself. First up is a bunch of lens adapters, which are simple attachments that slide over the barrel of the existing lens and change its field of view. These include a wide-angle, a telephoto and a few different fisheye versions. You can also get macro and close-up lens adapter sets.

I felt ashamed by my rather haughty dismissal of a camera I had never seen, and I promptly got myself one. At the time, the only one I found available was used, but it seemed pretty serviceable. I had been working on a long-time project of shooting old storefronts (still am), modelled after James and Karla Murray on the old storefronts of New York City. If you’re familiar with loading 120 film, loading a Holga shouldn’t present you with any issues. If it’s your first foray away from 35mm though, like it was for me, you’ll need to read the following guide. The Diana Mini is a small, delicate camera which is temperamental, yet with patience and practice can produce dreamy images with soft contrasts, lovely lighting and colours with an almost magical, vintage quality. The Holga optically is in a different class aided by the fact it is focusable. On target good central although things blur to the edge of frames. Optically this is the better camera. Unlike the Diana Mini it doesn’t try to ape the square frame format of it’s 120 parent. The 120GN has a glass lens, while the 120FN has a built-in flash. Simple maths then tells you a 120GFN has a glass lens and a flash.

So the Roniflex loses focal options, bulb and cable but does add 4 aperture points. Those aperture points are shown in both numbers and weather symbols for 100 ISO. It also is in the collection of Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDiP) !This camera is simple. It has one shutter button, a fixed wide angle lens and that is it. The colours are vivid with great vignetting and the results can be fun as well are artistic. If you're worried about all the settings on the Diana Mini or Holga 135bc then perhaps this is the camera for you, although you can't do multiple exposures. This camera is cheap and also comes in a fun variety of colours. While these films must take much of the credit, the Holga didn’t let them down when it came to contrast with the Shanghai GP3 and colours with the Lomography. Below are a few shots that show what can go wrong when shooting with a Holga. The first is an example of that parallax throwing your composition off. I thought I’d gotten the whole of her wedding dress in there, and the buildings should have been nearer the top of the frame.

Using the Holga 135BC is relatively easy and straightforward. Here are the basic steps to using the camera: Load FilmFirst is that there is actually a lot of sharpness in the centre of the frame if you get the focus right. The plastic meniscus lens isn’t completely useless in that respect, although shooting medium format film does help. My very first, hands-on ‘Lomography’ experience was with a SuperSampler. It was at a Lomography India organized monsoon photo walk in Bombay, and it took me all of 15 minutes to get through the 36 frames I had at my disposal (yeah, I’m kinda slow like that). No viewfinder, no sweat! It was one of the most liberating photography experiences I had had until then. The Diana Mini can be a bit more expensive if you want the flash included, so if you do want a flash, that is worth considering however I don't think it's completely necessary for either camera to have one as they both work better in natural light anyway.

An old Jeep-imitation vehicle (known as an “estanciera”) parked in a neighborhood street in Buenos Aires. Holga 135BC slightly cropped Lomography Color Negative 400. Before this camera, I’d never used a TLR before. Over the last year or so I’ve found that every time I use this camera my entire image making process slows down. Composing through a small-ish waist level finder is not particularly easy, so I take a lot more time to compose. This slowing down has helped me to be a lot more deliberate and thoughtful with my image makingAnd with the camera overall, I’d recommend leaving your serious face at home, knowing that you have no idea what results it’s going to give you, and just enjoying it for what it is. When you’re confident it’s in, wind the wheel on top of the camera to pull it on further, ensuring it’s rolling on tightly to avoid, or minimise at least, light leaks. When I was writing my eBook on the Holga cameras, I made the assumption that I would be covering as many Holga models as I could get my hands on—medium format Holgas, that is. I would not even deign to take a look at 35mm Holgas, which I considered an afterthought and beside the point. Besides this, there’s of course the great plastic Holga 47mm lens with it’s nice and soft touch we all like so much. The Holga 135, like his 120 sister, has these nice little icons on the lens barrel (1m/2m/6m/10m), 2 f-settings (f8 and f11), shoots at 1/100s speed and has also a “B” setting with tripod mount and a cable release thread for long exposure shooting.