6cm x 6cm

Foyles is one of London's most famous bookshops. For decades, there was only one Foyles. Now there is a branch, on London's South Bank. I was outside it one night with the Lubitel. To the best of my memory, this photo was taken handheld at 1/15th, wide open (f4.5).

Nice pic, for something that's widely denigrated as a piece of Russian plastic rubbish. ;-)

Photo is of a small ornamental pond in a tiny park in the Bayle area of Folkestone. Exposure was something like 1/15th @ f4.5, which is wide open on a Lubitel. Usually I use the Lubitel in 6x6 mode, but this time I used the 6x45 mask. And then later I forgot that it was supposedly in 645 mode, so I had a real mix of photos!

Rosi found this in a car-boot sale - for a pound! - and gave it to me as a present. I was a bit unimpressed initially, until I spotted "Use 120 film" written on the film winder, at which point I woke up. A real, live Brownie for a quid and it takes 120 film! I was off to the camera shop in Kelso for a roll of film early on Monday morning.



It's a pretty basic camera. It dates to around 1930. Photos are 6x9, so you get nine photos per roll. There's a dim little viewer on top, which works in portrait mode. There is no landscape viewer. I reckon this was the budget model. There's one shutter speed and one aperture. Poking round online suggests a shutter speed of around 1/40th and an aperture of maybe f11. The shutter speed depends mostly on whether the spring is still springy.

I'd no real conviction that it'd produce anything great. I reckoned that most of the photos would be pretty soft. As it happened, quite a few were. Looking at the photos, I've worked out that any subject needs to be 4m or twelve feet away at least. Any closer and you get this sort of effect. Both photos were shot on Portra 160.

As you can see, the hose at the bottom left is in focus but the plant isn't, because it was too close. With one shutter speed, you're a bit at the mercy of the weather. If the light's wrong, you're stuck. Most of the photos either didn't come out, or were a bit blurred or soft, like the one above. But this one was dead clear and I'm really pleased with it.



Isn't that gorgeous? If you'd like to see a bigger copy, click it.

This is one I took near work. Shot it on a Fuji S20 (digital - ssssh....). It was a rectangular photo but it was screaming to be square, so I cropped it more or less until it looked the way I wanted. And here you are. See? Square can be digital too. Now if only someone would make an affordable square digital camera......

Two recent photos from the Holga. Both shot on Ilford XP2. The car is a Fiat Grande Punto.

Comments welcome!

Saw a website mentioned in Amateur Photographer recently: bunnypix.co.uk. This fabulous site, which includes some prize-winning photos, contains photos taken in London and elsewhere in the 1970s. Looking at these photos is a whole tutorial in wide angle photography and makes me want to run out the door right now with my recently-bought Carl Zeiss Jena 2.8/20. But as I'm doing this during ads between sections of The West Wing, no chance of that. (Sigh. I am really going to miss The West Wing).

The photos on Bunnypix are all monochrome and were all shot on a Horizont camera - a Russian-made 35mm camera. So how's that medium format? 35mm film negative is generally 36mm wide x 24mm high. The Horizont goes a little further: 58mm wide x 24mm high. That's bigger than small format 35mm negatives!

There's more more about the Horizont here and here. And you can still buy them. These days they're called the Horizon 202. Google it. I've seen them online new for around GBP380 or around the EUR/US$500 mark. You can buy them on the Lomography site or elsewhere.

Weirdly, there's also a medium format version too. Search for a Horizon 205pc. That's pc for panoramic camera. It's not cheap, but it looks amazing. Well, it ought to be - makes the 35mm version look cheap.

But don't forget to visit Bunnypix. It's fabulous.

Two more from the harbour on the Flexaret, both from the same roll as the "Litter" photo below. Both show the same vignetting on the top corners as that one. Light leak, maybe... Hm. Might need some Holga tape on this one.

Well, I went to Prague as everyone knows by now and as ever, I ended up looking thoughtfully in camera shop windows. The full story will come later. The main thing is that I now have a second twin-lens - a Flexaret IV. There's a gallery of Flexarets on Meopta's website (the Flexaret uses Meopta lenses). More about the camera later. What gets me most at the moment is that I took it out to play in Folkestone harbour in the hope that it might even work. I guessed the exposures. And it... just... worked. I love this pic. I took it at about f4 or f5.6 - the lens itself is an f3.5, so this was close enough to wide open if it was at f4. There's very slight vignetting on this scan (shadows in the corners) - which isn't that obvious in the print. The textures of the stone and in whatever the bin is made of are very pleasant - especially on the print. For twenty pounds, it was a bargain.



Folkestone Harbour

Just in case anybody's actually looking at this blog (well, there are so many) and is interested, I'm setting the graphic of the photos shown size to 500x500 pixels or so. This works well on my 12" iBook and pretty well on my 17" screen at work, but if it's too big for anyone, please let me know. I'm keen to set sizes that everyone can see, without making the photos too small.

This is a long post on photo.net. It contains quite a number of mostly 6x6 photos produced on twin-lens cameras: Mamiyas, Rolleiflexes, Kodaks, Yashicas, Zeiss Ikons, Autocords, etc. The work includes landscapes, portraits, street photography, macro work, everything. If you want to see what medium format photography is all about, this is a good place to start. It takes a while to load this page, especially on dial-up but it's worth it.

The shot below is of Ottakar's window, in Folkestone, taken with my Holga. Ottakar's is a UK bookshop chain. I'm pleased with this shot because it's pretty much in focus, which was what I wanted. It'd probably be nicer in colour in some ways, but I like it in monochrome. It's an odd thing about the Holga. It's a toy and it's fun. Sometimes, it can come as a surprise that it can be a good camera, when the default exposure value happens to be right for the light. This shot is a lovely print.

My Holga came with the optional filter sets. One of the sets is a set of coloured filters. They're square and slide in. Kind of like Cokin filters, except they're plastic and probably cost about a penny each to make. I posted a while back that someone on Flickr has taken four photos with the coloured filters to see what effect they have.

The other set also contains coloured filters, plus one non-coloured filter. These filters have a clear spot in the middle and a translucent coating elsewhere. The idea is that the centre of the photo is clear while the edges are in soft focus. Added dreaminess, you might say.

I'd never played that much with the soft-focus filters, but I recently ran a roll through the Holga where some shots were taken with the clear soft-filter. I thought I'd put a few online. I've seen at least one post on this topic elsewhere and someone is bound to ask again.

This is my favourite. It's Django's coffee shop in Folkestone. Folkestone has several good coffee shops and it's an idea of mine to photograph them all with the Holga after I saw this one. As you can see, the centre of the photo (the table and the menu on the wall) are quite clear. The rest is progressively blurred.



The other is of my back garden. Gardening isn't a hobby, so I let the garden do its own thing, mostly.

I have a photo of the Holga with a filter fitted elsewhere on this blog if you're interested. The filter holder is push-on, pull-off and weighs almost nothing. The filters are plastic, so pretty unburstable.

Flickeur... What is Flickeur?

A Wired article on Flickr mashups took me to Flickeur.

Flickeur is... Weird. To quote the Wired article, Flickeur "loads a bunch of Flickr photos and plays them back as a short film set to music". However, that doesn't go quite far enough. The photos are random. The music is always the same, but it's randomised in some ways. Certain effects are applied to the photos, which merge into each other, mutate, morph, collage... There are also text effects. The end result looks like a documentary made by a deranged artist, armed with a Holga and a set of faulty musical intruments.

This could be an amazingly useful tool if you wanted to come up with a plot for a novel or a screenplay or just let your mind drift. As you watch, your mind makes associations and you begin telling yourself the story. But there is no story. Everything is supposedly random. ("The Truth Is Out There....").

To use Flickeur, you need Flashplayer 8. The site itself analyses your computer and gives you a link to the Flash player if you don't have it installed. I've tested Flickeur on Safari 1.3.2 and on Firefox 1.5.0.1 (on Mac OS X 10.3.9) and it works happily on both. It's worth a few minutes of your time if you'd like to see what can be done with stills.

It's full of answers to standard newbie questions about using Holgas and you can read it here.

Interesting thing. I blogged Anupam's photos below. They were taken with a Brownie. My mother's Brownie is sitting on a shelf behind me. Many of my childhood photos were taken on that camera. I saw them again recently and was surprised by how much detail is visible in many of them. I should scan a few for interest. My mum has many photos she took while youth hostelling and cycling with friends in the 1950s, also taken on that brownie camera, so it wasn't a new camera when she took shots of me and my kid sister in the 1960s.

What's interesting me more at the moment is that when she used that camera, it was still a fairly commonly-seen model. It wasn't a "toy" camera - it was just an ordinary camera. It has one shutter speed and a waist-level finder and takes 127 film (4cm x 4cm). The sort of camera ordinary people would have used in many places. Not new technology then but maybe no more unusual than a family having a ten year old car or a ten year old washing machine today.

So when did so many of these cameras become toys? Today's Holga wouldn't have been cutting edge in the 1960s, but many people then were using simple compacts which might now be seen as toys but were then seen as average family cameras, the way a simple Canon or Olympus might have been seen as a family camera ten years ago and a 5mp digital camera would be seen as a simple sort of family camera today (ignoring the fact that everyone in the family has a mobile with a camera built in).

So when did the "toy" epithet appear? Who decides? Is the bicycle of the 1960s a toy bicycle? Is a 1960s VW Beetle a toy car? Is the mirror (or chair or crockery) you inherited from your parents a toy mirror?

Is an IBM 286 with WordStar and MSDOS a toy computer? I'm inclined to say yes. But the VW isn't a toy car, despite today's turbodiesel Beetles being so far beyond the Beetles of the 1960s in fuel economy, speed, emissions... It's an interesting perspective.

Take Leica's M3. I have what I think is an awesomely good film SLR: Nikon's F75. It was cheap, it meters perfectly, it's lightweight, reliable, does everything for you or does some of it or can be purely manual. It can use AF lenses or P lenses, does PASM, flash, spot... All the usual stuff. Does that mean a Leica M3 is a toy camera?

Is it a toy because you'd be embarrassed to be seen with it? Is saying something is a "toy" a way of excuising yourself for being somehow "uncool"? A sort of inverted snobbery? If it's not a "classic", is it a toy? If your 1960s car is a Hillman or a Simca instead of a VW, is it a toy? (Actually, Simcas were quite classy...).

So is the Brownie or even the Holga a toy or a camera? I've commented on photo.net somewhere that I was surprised by the Holga - get it right and it can take remarkably good pictures. Which is probably why people use them - they do take good photos. But what makes one obsolete product a toy and another obsolete product not a toy? It's an interesting question and comments would be appreciated.