OK, It ‘s my last semester at the Academy Of Art University in San Francisco, and I’m about to defend my thesis in early May, so I can graduate.
I am taking a fun, but challenging class, Pinhole and Plastic Cameras, and right now we are concentrating on Plastic Cameras. I have purchased my new little Plastic Camera, the Holga. It’s meant to give you some freedom of expression, due to it’s lack of controls, and control! It’s a time to “let go” and go out and have fun, not knowing for sure if you will have anything when you get home. It has a fixed little lens that surprised me after seeing what it sees and gets, because you are looking through a small little view finder window that is not “what you see is what you get”. SO you really have no idea how you are framing it or what will be inside the frame, for starters. Then you can change the “focus” by turning it to one of 4 pictures; one person (3feet), two persons (6ft), many persons (18 ft), or mountain (30 ft to infinity). Then near the lens you have a little slide that can be on a cloudy picture or on a sun picture, that’s it for “F/stop”, which is about f/11 or f/8. And the shutter speed is about 1/100 of a second. Then you can work another slide, which one side is a B and the other side is an N. N is for normal, and B is for bulb, so as long as you hold down the shutter button, you can take timed exposures, or you can just click the shutter twice to let in more light. It has a tripod screw opening, and if you choose you can buy the model with a flash attached to the top of the camera. Now the most amazing thing is that this little plastic camera shoot medium format film (120)! Who would have thought.. (more…)