On Film: Holga 120 Panoramics
CAMERA: HOLGA PANORAMIC
FILM: FUJI VELVIA 50, VELVIA 100, FUJI PROVIA 100
This 6x12 photo was shot in the valleys of Kapadokya, Turkey, on a very sunny day. The dwellings carved into the valley walls, in fairly sharp focus in this photo, date back to the Roman period. Film: Provia 100F
The Holga Panoramic is a Lomography brand camera that shoots 6x12 frame photos on 120 film. Like all Lomography cameras, it’s constructed almost entirely of plastic - including the lens - and has almost no user functionality outside of a clunky shutter and a film advance so rudimentary and loose, it’s almost comical that you use real (expensive) film in it. There are no ISO or shutter settings, so taking pictures in any light other than sunny f/16 weather will produce very dark images and be a waste of film.
The Holga Panoramic camera, I think this model is no longer in production.
The focus “settings” on a holga.
The camera has a 90mm 1:8 fixed plastic lens with 3 focus “settings” (portrait, group, and landscape) though the lens is marked with pictograms instead of numbers. Needless to say, getting decently focused photos with a Holga is something that only comes with practice and luck. The advantage here is by sheer fact of using a panoramic camera, I am almost always taking landscape photos using the landscape (infinity) setting, so many of the pano shots on this page have decent focus for a holga, though the vignette effect - an increasingly softer focus on the outer edges of the image - is a constant.
The level on top is very useful, particularly because a crooked horizon line in a 6x12 photo is brutally unforgiving, even if it’s just off by 1mm.
The plastic lens.
Another 6x12 shot in Kapadokya, Turkey, demonstrates the sharpness of focus in the center, but a blurry vignette effect on the sides. Film: Provia 100F.
Yet what the Holga panoramic camera lacks in quality, it makes up for in accessibility to experiment with shooting a 6x12 frame on 120 film, double the size of the 6x6 frame of a standard Holga. For me, the scope of a 6x12 photo is reminiscent of the aspect ratio of a widescreen movie, not just because the similarity in scope, but also the quality of soft film image that the plastic lens produces, even when focused accurately.
Greek columns at the Washington DC arboretum near dusk. Film: Rollei 200
Kapdokya, Turkey, shot on Velvia 100. Velvia tends to give a more magenta shift in colors, but this was also taken with the sun directly overhead, resulting in a high constrast image.
The two photos below were shot on Rollei 200 slide film, which has more intense saturation than Fuji slide film and sometimes requires a lot of gamma correction after a scan to get bright images. Then again, why should I be expecting a Holga to expose film properly, particularly such a high maintainence film like Rollei?
