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Skylar, Nantahala, North Carolina, June, 2007. View Larger Image
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Coming Soon: Image of the Week Fine Art Print Offer
Each week, I post an image from my recent or historical work and talk a little
bit about it; the process, creative thought, and technical details that
contributed to its creation. During the week an image is featured, I offer it as
a Limited Edition Fine Art Print at a special price. Each image is printed
personally by me on the latest Epson printers using archival pigment inks on
acid-free archival paper. The prints are shipped matted and signed and can be
framed using a standard size, off-the-shelf frame from your local frame shop.
Learn more about my fine art printing process.
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Image of the Week
I've always prided myself on using the latest and highest quality gear and techniques in my
photography. I spend hours on the preparation and the execution of an image to insure
maximum sharpness and clarity, as well as a lot of time at the computer editing raw images
to find the few (or single!) frames from a shoot that really worked.
That is, unless I'm shooting with a Holga.
Developed as a cheap way for the average Chinese citizen to engage in the burgeoning hobby
of photography, the Holga has enjoyed a surge of Western popularity during the
last few years. Basically, it's a toy camera that leaks light like a screen door. The plastic
meniscus lens is barely sharp in the center and looks like it's coated with Vaseline in the
corners. Unlike your swanky DSLR or digital Point & Shoot, you look through a viewfinder
and not through the lens itself, so focusing is a guessing game. Shooting with a wide range
of two shutter speeds (1/100 and Bulb) and two apertures (ƒ/8 and ƒ/11), it
records blurry, flare-ridden images on 120 medium format film.
So, why do people like it?
There's a certain panache to the low-fidelity output of the Holga. It's retro-chic. A number
of amateur and professional photographers find the flaws to be aestheically pleasing. The
Holga produces an image "out of the box" that many shooters would spend hours in Photoshop
trying to emulate. I like it because it's freeing, and every image I shoot with it can be a
wonderful surprise, or a crushing failure.
This week's image is one of Skylar, the daughter of some close friends who recently accompanied
Amy and I on a vacation to the mountains of North Carolina. A true child of the digital age,
Skylar was sneaking peaks at the back of my Holga to see the image I had just shot.
She was disappointed to learn my obsolete toy doesn't feature an instant image preview.
Is this week's image a wonderful surprise, or crushing failure? Let me know what you think.
Technical Data
Using a Nikon SB-26 hotshoe flash in Auto Mode to fill in the heavily backlit scene, I
exposed the frame of Kodak Tri-X 400 in the Holga's Bulb mode for approximately 1 second at ƒ/8.
I developed the film in 1:25 Rodinal for 7 minutes at 68°. The film was scanned on an
Epson 4990 and warm-toned in Adobe Lightroom before printing on an Epson 3800.
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