Oscillation

To everything there is a season, and this season, I've dug out some old low-fi cameras and some now-outdated film. This morning, I'm pondering the Holga.

I first discovered the Holga in Maine, in 1999, through my fabulous teacher Leslie Bowman and the Maine Photographic Workshops. It's a plastic medium format camera, and it cost $20 when I bought it. I desperately wanted a medium format camera, and I bought an old Yashica Mat 126-G for $200 soon after. I ended up selling it four years later in Iowa City, and I got $200 for it. I really needed the money at the time, and the camera needed a serious tune-up. Still, I wish I hadn't sold it, as I'd like to be able to use it now.

Neither of these attempts at medium format were very successful, or lasted very long. I took some fun pix with the Holga (and will post some of the old early work soon), and even the Yashica had its moments. I was happiest with lush color on 35 mm slides and Polaroid Transfers though. Then on to Iowa. My first year in graduate school, in 2000, started a brief but tragic affair with 4x5, an even larger format. Some potentially gorgeous results, but entirely too cumbersome for my personality. Lovely large negatives lead to heavy cameras, leggy tripods, and massive prints. No thanks.

But I think the real problem is that I was too green to know how to use them. I feel so much more confident in digital because it's foolproof. I can see the results and keep shooting until I know I have what I want. My love for color is abiding, and the Digital Rebel and I are happy together. I must also confess that I don't know how to use half the functions on that camera, which I bought in late 2004, but I'm now familiar enough with the first half to go boldly into discovering if there's anything else I can do with it.

But I'm also drawn back to the dozen rolls of 120 film and the old Holga I found down in the basement. After starting with 35 mm black and white photography, I was so enamoured with the idea of large squares, and found medium format to be a compatible medium for my personality. I like 12 exposures on a long skinny spool of film, wrapped in paper like a little scroll, the size and shape of the perfect crispy eggroll.

So I'm going to play with the Holga. And it turns out that Mark, the photographer I work with at the Lab, has an old Hasselblad he wants to sell. He just threw out a ton of film, unfortunately, but he's going to bring the camera and all the gear into the Lab for me this week. In 1999 I wanted a Hasselblad so badly I could taste it. Neither the Yashica nor the Holga could do what I wanted to do at the time, I think. Or maybe I just didn't know what I wanted to do. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the Holga, or the Hasselblad for that matter. But it's time for a change, again, for now.