Holga 120N (aka king of the light leak)

I dug my Holga 120N plastic camera out recently, loaded it with a roll of Tmax 100, and then covered all of the seams with good old electrical tape from Lowes.

The Holga is a great little plastic camera. There's no frills involved. Trust me when I say that your phone has more capabilities in terms of technology but in terms of artistic and creative photography the Holga is a great tool once you get used to its little quirks.

Those quirks are what help the photographer create some really interesting and somewhat dreamy shots.

You are starting with a two piece plastic box with a manual film advance, plastic lens, two very high tech aperture settings (sun or no sun) and two exposure settings N for normal and B for bulb. If you're not careful the B could mean BLURRY because the switch is on the bottom of the camera and it's real easy to turn it without realizing you've done that. Once it's set to B the shutter stays open as long as you hold the release down. Nobody tells you that though. You have to wait to get a really lousy set of pictures processed first and then go searching for the reason among other Holga users on-line.

The most quirky aspect of the Holga though are the light leaks. Sometimes they will yield some wonderful pictures but often as not they wreak havoc with what you are trying to capture. That's where the electrical tape comes into play.

This particular shot is one of my personal favorites. It was taken last year on Plum Island, Massachusetts and the boards you see sticking out of the sand are part of an old ship wreck that appears periodically depending on the tides and actions of the waves.

The light leaks along with the vignetting common with plastic lenses adds a real ethereal quality to this image that can't be achieved with Photoshop and HDR.

Here are a few from a roll I shot this January.

wooden lobster traps are pretty rare
Massachusetts. This was washed up
on Plum Island

Stone walls line both sides of an
abandoned road on Weir Hill in
No. Andover, MA

This wooden dory caught my eye at low tide in
Chauncy Creek, Kittery Point ME

Argus C44 a classic blend of form, function and industrial design

Sometimes when I start looking around on-line I find things I've just gotta have.

Most recently was an Argus C-44 rangefinder camera.  It was only manufactured for one year 1956-57. Argus was really the driving force behind the 35mm film format in the US. They sold millions of the C-3 Brick, C-4 and the C-44.

All of them were made from heavy machined aluminum with lots of decorative touches. For their time they were quite modernistic in appearance and really works of industrial art.

Modeled after the classic Leica rangefinders the Argus C-44 takes great pictures and has all the features one would expect in a well made hand held camera.

• Five preset shutter speeds plus
• Aperture settings from f4-f22
• 50mm f2.8 lens came standard with optional wide angle and telephoto lenses.

So far I've only shot one roll of Kodak Tmax 100 and admittedly some of the dial and settings take some getting used to but I was very pleased with the initial results. I'm looking forward to trying some other low speed black and white films to try to replicate the artistic look of 1950s photographers.

I love old cameras. Especially those that are still working. There's a sense of touching history when I use them. This is a photo I took in early spring of 2012 in Topsfield Massachusetts. I was using a Kodak Brownie 127 camera made in the UK in the 50's.

random photos

This is a pinhole photo of the Chicago skyline that I took in November of 2012.