Kodak Portra 160 w/ Mamiya 6 & 50m 4.0 lens

My name is Nikkia Margaret Hall. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1989 and have just moved back. I have been shooting analog for over a decade now, and while my pocket can barely handle it, I am intently dedicated to the medium because of its overwhelmingly unique and gorgeous qualities. My photographs revolve around the essence of light, and focus on it’s intimate beauty. My most recent project, Father Sun Mother Earth, speaks to these themes through crisp yet delicate images.

—Nikkia Margaret

[img from top: Kale from Gary [2012], My New Favourite Shirt [2012], Sean’s Hendrick’s [2012] ]

Click here to find out how you too can share your photos and story with CGSF!!

Shanghai GP3 BW Negative 100 on Holgamod Holga 120N

Ilfotec HC 1+31, 6:30mins, Epson V700

I still love shooting my Holga. The best, cheapest, fuss-free plastic camera money can buy. No hip covers, no pretentious packaging. It just shoots, period.

Shanghai BW film may not be the best choice (or even an average choice)   to shoot portraits owing to the massive grain & thin paper backing but it gives a characteristic look to your shots. In this series for instance, I was trying for that grungy, edgy look and I think it pretty much worked the way I wanted. Forget about those photoshop or even iPhone photo textures. The Shanghai is the real deal.

Holga + Shanghai BW 100 film. The far east wins.

-delusiana

Shanghai GP3 BW Negative 100 on Holgamod Holga 120N

Ilfotec HC 1+31, 6:30 mins, Epson V700

You must have noticed by now how much I love my Holgamods Holga 120N as it’s heavily featured in this blog. It’s light, easily shoved in my handbag and produces heavenly images.

In this series, I chose the Shanghai BW GP3 100 as I wanted the grainy texture that was perfect for the sombre mood while traipsing all over the heritage-rich Singapore.

I can’t remember the name of this church, it was situated somewhere near Fort Canning Park and chanced upon it while waiting for a bus to get to our next destination. 

Although the sun was high and it was blisteringly hot that day, the churchyard was cool & calm as it was shrouded with trees. I quite like the effect of this film but wished I had remembered to shoot at the cloudy setting as the heavy grain obscured the details of the statues. For example  in the last picture, a couple was depicted writhing & prostrating under the giant cross but I doubt you’d notice that given the massive grain.

But will I stop using the Shanghai? Hell no! :D

-delusiana

Kodak Tri-X 400 on Holga 120N (TMax Developer 1:9)

Nothing much to say about this film as everyone knows it’s my favorite B&W film of all time. I simply love to shoot with the Tri-X when light is scarce. I don’t mean in low-light, but just when shadows loom over the scene before you or when it is cloudy out. You get so much more contrast and definition in your pictures. As you can also see from the pictures above, I forgot to remove the 4x6 mask from my Holga before I shot the roll. I am always one to fawn over 6x6 images, (yes, I love my squares) but I have to say it actually is pretty cool to shoot with the 4x6 mask when you want to avoid lens distortion and blurry edges from showing up in your picture.

What about you? Are you a 6x6 purist or do you fancy 4x6 on the Holga at times?

-eleanorrigby236

Ilford FP4+ on Certomatic
(developed in Ultrafin Plus 1:4 @6:00mins)

Kodak Tri-X 400 on Certomatic
(developed in TMax Developer 1:9 @10:30mins)

Here are some test shots from a 10EUR camera made in Dresden in 1962 I picked up in Hamburg last summer.Like many other German medium format cameras from this time (read: not plastic!!), the camera comes equipped with a fairly sharp glass lens and uses a 3-position zone focusing system. The Certomatic has three adjustable aperture settings, f8, f11 and f16 and although fitted with something that looks like a selenium photocell, the light meter is absolutely redundant, the shutter fires almost under all light conditions at about 1/50, allowing it to shoot very well in day time outdoors, but not at all indoors, even with artificial lighting. Thankfully, the camera comes with a Bulb mode to allow for longer exposures and for use at night.

One thing worth mentioning is that you cannot shoot double exposures on this camera as the advance reel comes with a mechanism that locks the shutter button after you fire it. It will be unlocked again after you have advanced to the next frame. This is both at once good and bad depending on the type of photography you do.

I think this camera would suit lo-fi portrait photographers well, as the lens distortion is not as severe as on the Holga and the lens is sharp enough to capture details on the subject. I will take some color shots next to see how the camera fairs then. Not bad for a 10EUR camera!

-eleanorrigby236

Certo Camerawerk from Gönna&Söhne, Dresden, 1962

I was inspired to try the Microclick technique after seeing some examples in the Holga groups on Flickr. It appealed to me because as I’d already experimented with things like multiple exposures, and hacking toy cameras to give more painterly, dreamy images.

It’s one of those techniqies that’s a bit easier to do than it is to explain - basically it’s taking multiple exposures of the same subject, but offsetting the exposures whilst rotating or panning the camera (always left to right). There are guides on squarefrog (www.squarefrog.co.uk/techniques/microclicks.html) so I won’t repeat all their tips here. As a starrting point I try and overlap about a third of the viewfinder view between shots, and click on 4 times. That’s my basic technique, but then I sometimes vary the amount of overlap, and the number of clicks.

The easiest camera to use is a Holga 120 (medium format). This is because the winding on mechanism and the shutter are not linked, so you can fire the shutter as many times as you like, and wind on as much as you like between shots. Also the simplest Holga is about the cheapest toy camera you can buy. Other options are the Diana / Diana mini, Sprocket Rocket and the new Belair camera, all by Lomography (not tried any of those myself)

You can use any film you like - so far I’ve shot colour neg, cross-processed slide film and redscaled film. There are some fantastic black-and-white images online, though I’ve not tried it yet.

The one thing you need to bear in mind is that you are building up 3 or 4 exposures on any one bit of your film, so it’s easy to overexpose your image. Therefore it’s best NOT to shoot in bright sunlight - my Olympic stadium Microclick was shot at dusk, after it had just got too dark to shoot normally with a Holga.

It’s also really handy to use redscale film as it’s much harder to overexpose that than regular film, and the dreamy painterly results seem to work really nicely with that film. I think you can roll your own medium format redscale but it’s trickier than making 35mm, so it’s easiest to buy the Lomography Redscale 120 film - I prefer the XR over the normal Redscale 100 - more subtle colours, less firey reds.

The biggest problem with shooting microclicks is getting your films scanned - as the finished image is around 2 to 3 times wider than normal 6x6 medium format frame. A lot of photo labs will struggle to scan them - I’m lucky to have a friendly lab in London that is used to doing them - they scan them in ovelapping passes then I stick them back together in Photoshop. But I know most people end up scanning them on their own flatbed scanners.

My best advice is not to get too bogged down in the technique (I can remember stressing about how many degrees to rotate the camera) and just to shoot a test roll - just make a note of how many clicks you wound on on each attempt. It’s all a bit hit-and-miss, but when it works it can produce really interesting results.

-James Butler

CGSF: Thanks for sharing James! Guys and girls, you can click here to check out the sample shots above in higher resolution. James has tons of amazing pictures on his stream, especially his double exposures, so make sure to check out his Flickr.

Efke IR820 on Holgamods Holga 120N

Self-developed: Ilfotec HC 1+31, 7 mins

(Epson V700)

It’s sad that the Efke has stopped producing all their papers & photographic films. I bought about 5 rolls of Efke IR820 infrared films sometime in 2011 and have kept them in the fridge till last week when I decided to shoot a roll in Langkawi. They were expensive when I bought them off eBay and now that they’re obsolete, I’m pretty sure their prices have skyrocketed.

From a discussion thread on Flickr here, the high silver content in their film produces unique BW images that were unlike any other but the costs incurred to produce these films far outstripped the demands resulting in the closure of the film plant :(

Okay, back to the details of this shoot: I shot the roll using my Holgamod Holga 120N in Langkawi, an island off the northern state of Kedah in Peninsular Malaysia. Langkawi shares the waters of the Malacca Straits and the Andaman Sea which faces Thailand.

It was really hot & super bright during my three day stay, all of which favors infrared photography. However, I made 2 grave mistakes.

First: I did not use a tripod and all shots were hand-held, resulting in the noticeable shakes to all my shots. Granted, the first two shots were quite all right, but that’s because I placed the camera on a railing overlooking the mangrove forest of Kilim. Now this brings me to my next mistake.

Second: From the 3rd exposure onwards, I got confused with the Holga aperture and ended shooting the whole roll at the “Night/Cloudy” setting! 

Let me explain, seasoned Holga users will know that the Holga has a switch at the bottom indicating 2 aperture setting of f11 & f8. Unmodified Holgas actually have a working aperture of f13 on either setting due to a manufacturing oversight (although apparently this problem was rectified post 2009 Holga productions, I dunno). However, mine is a Holgamod thus I’ve been shooting at f8 under the bright sun!

Also, when you shoot infrared film, you need to use the bulb mode to keep the aperture open to allow sufficient light to pass through the IR filter which is so dark it’s almost black. I used a Hoya R72 filter on my Holga and timed the shoot at 5-8 seconds.

You can definitely see in my set that from the 3rd picture onwards, all the shots have blurred edges with clear imprint of the paper backing resulting in those unsightly grains! Aaargh! Again my hypothesis of extreme light passing through the camera resulting in the imprints. Yes, you can also get such defects in thin paper backings like in the cheap Shanghai GP3 or in fat rolls (due to the light leaks) but this roll was definitely not fat and it most certainly wasn’t cheap, heh.

This was my 2nd attempt at infrared photography, the first using an Ilford SFX 200 here and I have to admit that I vastly prefer the Efke. Too bad it’s no more :(

-delusiana

Shanghai GP3 100 (respooled) on Sabre 620 Box Camera

(self developed: Ilford Ilfotec HC 1+31, 6:30 mins)

(Epson V700)

My statement above may tick some nerve but hey, it’s always summer in Malaysia! LOL.

As promised I’m back with more updates, this time with my very cute red Sabre 620 box camera! You guys probably have read Stephanie-Eversull Lakos’ feature on this camera before and I must say that it does wonders with any BW film.

Of course, traditionalists may condemn our excessive love for the “golf-ball sized grains” of the Shanghai BW film but we thought they add a lot of character to the photographs.

Also, I hypothesized that the reason we get tons of grain when using the Shanghai is due to the thin & porous backing paper, allowing light (especially when shot under excessive sunlight) to leak through the paper pores and onto the film, thus the imprint.

This problem doesn’t just affect the Shanghai, in fact if the light source is bright enough, you can even get this effect with other films.

I’m not going to elaborate on the characteristics of the Sabre 620 as you can read that from the link above but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the fact that double exposing the film resulted in less grain as evidenced by the 4th photo. Now that totally boggles the mind because if you think logically, wouldn’t you get twice as much light exposure and with my hypothesis you should get even more grain!  ZOMG!

Can somebody explain this to me? :D

Till then, here’s a shot of my Sabre baby.

-delusiana

Fujichrome T64 (expired) on Holgamods Holga 120N

Happy 2013 everybody!

Enjoying your holidays? I certainly did (and still am, LOL) and this will be proven by a slew of updates from yours truly. Finally managed to get some good photo action when I was in Langkawi Island 2 days ago. 

I chose the Tungsten 64 roll as I wanted the soft pastel tinge to my shots, although as you can see most of them were overexposed owing to the blazing hot island sun! 

To tell you the truth I haven’t shot anything for the past 4 months so I thought of finally using my Holgamods Holga. Of course, I’d planned to shoot some infrared shots so when that roll was finished I promptly popped in the T64 and swapped the IR filter with a Polarized one instead. But giddy as I am in wanting to shoot as much film as possible during my short island stay, I’d completely forgotten to switch off the bulb mode! The horrors!

But I guess all is not lost as the shots turned out quite ok, with a painterly quality to them.  

Alright then, I’m off to develop some BW shots now, hopefully they’ll turn out good!

-delusiana