Holga 120 GCFN: not bad at all

I recently bought a Holga 120 camera. It's a dirt-cheap medium format toy camera. Amongst it's features are an unsharp plastic lens, light leaks through the back, uncertain apertures, uncertain shutter speed, uncertain focussing and, to top it off, heavy vignetting in the corners. All of these defects can become features once you realize there is a certain charm to a not-so-perfect picture. The movement is called lomography and stresses the serendipity factor in photography. Not knowing what the outcome will be is part of the fun. Some would even say 'art'.

Personally I don't see how you can create art when you're not al least trying to be in control of the creation. I like the Holga style of images, but I think the successful ones are not made by accident but through careful planning and experience with photography.

The Holga camera I bought is the 'top model', the GCFN type: G stands glass lens, F stands for flash and C stands for color. Color means you can turn a yellow, blue or red filter in front of the flash. That might come in handy for the black&white pictures. I opted for the glass lens because it seemed to be a bit sharper. I know Holga cameras aren't about sharpness, but I feel that to enjoy the distortions in the image at least the center part of the image should be sharp.

The pictures turned out way better then I had hoped. I will not go into detail of how stupid it was to put the image counter on 16 and having the mask for 6x6 film, meaning 12 exposures in the camera. But the end result is that all frames severely overlap, making it a bit difficult to judge how the image looks in the corners. Apart from this mistake, the images are very usable.

Anyway, vignetting is within very limited boundaries, although some pictures show more vignetting then others.  I don't know why this is the case. Sharpness is also quite good. The center area (only about 20% of the image width) is pretty sharp, but it rapidly drops off from there. The camera features 2 diaphragms (f8 and f11). The smallest diaphragm seems to deliver a bit more sharpness, whilst the large one gives a more dreamy picture. The most difficult part is focussing the camera. The markings on the lens are not really correct. 1m looks more like 1m20, 2m might be around 2m50 and 6m seems to about 4-5m. I would have to take more controlled pictures to really test this. Infinity is not sharp yet at 10m, so I guess it is really infinity and not a hyperfocal focussing distance.

The first roll of film I used was a fuji pro 400h. I intend to use the camera for black&white, but I wanted to test a C41 color film first to see what the camera could do without any other variables influencing the outcome.

Here are a couple of sample images from the first roll. The large format originals can be found in this Flickr set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/sets/72157629538873324

The Rolleflex image that I used for comparison can be found here on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/6973897390

This picture is clearly showing the drop off in sharpness from center to corner. It also shows that flaring is very well controlled, with the sun being right in the center of the image (albeit a bit hidden behind a cloud).

In this picture you see that the viewfinder only shows part of the image. The group of kids occupied about 90% of the viewfinder, whilst in the final image there is a lot of room added. (thanks to this I got some usable shots, despite the mistake of setting the camera on 16 shots instead of 12)

This picture is focussed at infinity. The tree with white blossom in the center is about 10m away, but the horizon is clearly sharper, meaning the dof doesn't reach that far forward (aperture was f8).

Here I focussed at 2m. The buckets are at a distance of 2m, but the focal plane (or should I say focus spot) is a bit further away.

This is the best image I got from the film. The focus is again at infinity, but the diaphragm is f11 this time, making the tree look a bit sharper. If only the frame overlap wouldn't have happened...

This image shows the 'B' setting of the shutter. It is made after sunset with an exposure time of 12s on the top of the roof of my car. Focus on infinity seems to be correct on the trees in the distance.

Here the focus is on 6m, but the monument in the foreground is only about 4-5m away at the point where it is the sharpest. It's also made at f11, so the church in the distance still has reasonable sharpness.

Just to compare how a sharp image looks like I added a T-max scan of an image I developed yesterday in Rodinal 100+1 stand developement, 10 years after it was shot. The image is taken by a super-sharp Rolleiflex Planar lens. It could be even sharper if the shutterspeed would have been a bit higher, but it already shows that there is a real difference between a sharp Holga image and a sharp image of a real camera.