Road Trip!!!!!!!

 It’s been soooooo long since we went anywhere for any length of time. We’ve done some fun day trips and we’ve been on a couple overnighters to go see the boy, but we haven’t proper been away since before The Plague Times. Tomorrow morning, though, we drop the News Hound off at Pet Camp and head to a fancy resort in Greensboro for four whole nights! It’s not quite really a vacation, though. It’s the annual conference of the North Carolina Association of Municipal Clerks, during which my lovely bride will become the new president of the Association. I’m very proud. I’m also really happy I get to tag along. Lisa will be in classes all day, so I will actually have a bit of vacation time. Naturally, I’m planning to use it to play with cameras.

We’ve been to Greensboro enough that I have a start of an idea of some things I need to see and hopefully shoot. The city has a fun little downtown area that we’ve mostly just driven through, so exploring that is high on the list. Greensboro prides itself on its green spaces, too, so I have some gardens and parks and trails on my list as well. It’s supposed to be sticky hot, but partly cloudy with just a chance of thunderstorms rolling through, so should be pretty good photography weather. And since Lisa’s classes start early, I can easily get my butt out for morning light and come back to do some magazine when the light is harsh (and it’s super hot.) That’s the plan anyway.

I’ve not been anywhere on photo safari since I began messing about with film photography, so I was’t sure what I wanted to bring. After thinking about it a it, I settled on pretty much everything. I have a good sling camera bag and also a fairly large backpack, so I have the room. I’ll leave the Brownie at home because folding it is a little iffy, but I’m bringing the Holga and the Petri 7 and the Eos R. I have the two RF lenses as well as the telephoto and the wide angle zooms. I figure I can look at the day’s weather and where I’m going and pack the sling with whatever I’ll want for that trip. Or throw the backpack in the car, who knows? But as far as cameras and lenses, I’m pretty well covered.

The Go Bag

Film left me putting in a little more thought. I’m leaving the slide fil at home because that’s for my Disney Project and I’m not confident about being able to replace any that i would use in Greensboro. The medium format film for the Holga was pretty easy as well. I’m taking three rolls each of Tri-X 400 and Lomo 400, that way I’ll have both color and black and white. I’m thinking it might be fun to load the Holga with color and the Petri with B&W or vice versa, so I always have both as options. That means I’m able to bring some pretty funky 35mm film. I have my Washi “S” 50 ISO sound recording film as well as both the 50D and 500T Vision3 Kodak film stocks from Film Photography Project. I’m also packing a couple rolls of the tried and true Gold 200 as well as two rolls of the very normal but new to me ProImage 100. 

I think that gives me a wide variety of film speeds in both color and monochrome for the Petri. I’m expecting lots of light, so the low ISO stuff should work well, especially in the urban areas. I can go to the 200 for the shady spots in the woods if I end up there. That’s the plan anyway. 

I’m hoping to have the chance to branch out a bit with my subject matter. Not only is it a new city, but it’s also much more urban than even Wilmington, so should offer a different style of shooting than I’m used to here at the beach. If there are people around, I could try some street photography. We’ll see if I get up the nerve. Maybe shooting strangers won’t seem so weird in a city. We shall see. 

And I’ll also always have the mirrorless Eos R with all its bells and whistles and options and a  big pile of memory cards to go along with it. 

I’m looking forward to spending some time just focusing on photography (heh, see what I did there). If all goes well, I’ll be busy in Jeff’s FotoMat and on the computer when we get back. And let’s be honest, this is a dry run for the Disney trip, so any lessons learned will be valuable. It’s all very exciting :-)

The Holga 120N: Socialist Photography

 The Holga was developed in China to provide a camera to the Chinese working class. They were fans of 120 format film at the time, so it’s a medium format camera, made of plastic so it was easy and cheap to produce for the masses. The original had two f-stops (f8 and f11), a fixed shutter speed of 1/100th of a second, and a plastic lens that could be focused from 3 ft to infinity. It was, and if we’re being honest still is, an total piece of crap of a camera. 

The Holga is poorly made. The plastic that makes up its body isn’t particularly good plastic. It either comes straight from the factory with light leaks or tends to develop them over time. The lens is plastic and also not well made so focus is entirely random between cameras. You may get one that is sharp in the middle to varying degrees, or you may not. There is heavy a vignette. The camera back gets looser with use and will eventually just randomly fall off if you don’t gaff tape that sucker on. It’s bad.

It was also, in its time, hugely popular in China. The Chinese loved taking photos and this was the camera they could buy. There were no options, no free market with other cameras with different or more features or cameras that were better made at a higher price point. It was an option of buy the Holga or don’t buy the Holga. And they bought the Holga. Until 35mm film penetrated mainland China and became popular. 

With fewer people buying the Holga in Mainland China, the government manufacturer expanded sales into Hong Kong, and eventually into the rest of the world. And then options became available, because all of a sudden the Holga needed to compete on a free market. It got a cold shoe for a flash and a tripod mount. But that was about it. It didn’t do well and production was stopped. 

Then Westerners discovered it. Frustrated and maybe a little worn out with modern cameras and all their amazing features, a small but dedicated group of film photographers fell in love with the Holga and its bare bones, Communist simplicity. Once photographers made the conscious choice to use a plastic piece of crap camera all its flaws became features. The vignette became artistic and the lousy focus of the plastic lens became “soft focus,” again, artistic. Production resumed. The free market had saved the communist camera. Now they come in all sorts of varieties. Some are panoramic, some have multiple colors of built-in flash, there’s even a 3-D model, I think. Also, they now come in fashion colors, not just the proletariat black of the original. 

This thing is so ugly it’s cute. Here it’s set on the sunny f-stop and the “mountains” focus. 

It’s still plastic and still, really, a piece of crap. But it’s a $35 medium format camera and I had to try it. And I love it. It really is fun, after using a camera that can do pretty much anything I ask of it, to use a camera that will do what IT wants no matter my thoughts or wishes. 

Shooting with the Holga is easy. You just put the aperture setting on the clouds or the sun depending on if it’s cloudy or sunny, try to noodle out if you should use the one person, two people, group of people or mountain focus setting, aim the camera in the general direction of what you want to shoot (the viewfinder doesn’t show you what the lens will see) and click. 

I used the “one person” focus and Lisa came out in focus!

As I mentioned earlier, each Holga is different. Some people buy several and then pick which to use based on each camera’s peculiarities. I only have the one and feel like I lucked out. It is really pretty nicely focused at the center of the frame but drops of to a kind of wavy out of focus-ness at the edges. The more light I have the heavier the vignette is. I don’t have any light leaks yet. I’ve run a roll of color and a roll or black and white film through it and was pleased with the results. I wouldn’t use it for any sort of professional purpose or to shoot a once in a lifetime event, but as something to carry around and play with, it is absolutely a blast. And it weighs almost nothing, so carrying it around is easy. 

In bright sun, the vignette is heavy, but I like it

I’m grateful to live in a capitalist country where my options for pretty much everything are almost inconceivably wide. I wouldn’t want the Holga to be my one and only photography option. But it is really cool to be so blessed with high quality photographic equipment at prices I can afford that I can buy a truly bad piece of equipment and love it for it’s flaws. 

Just look at the difference in focus from the center to the edge. 

Road Trippin’ with Pedro

 Now that the lovely Miss Lisa and I are vaccinated against The Plague we have ventured forth into the world again. That was the toughest part of the Plague Times, the staying at home. We’re not staying at home people. At all. In the Before Times we were always hearing people ask us where we were going next or telling us they liked following us on social media to see where we would end up next. People would ask, “Aren’t you ever at home?” Doing what, I wondered. Mowing the grass? Dusting the house? Watching TV?

 I really don’t know what the stay at home crowd does at home. It’s not a part of my experience. Growing up, we were always on the move. We’d just “take a ride” on the weekends, with no particular destination in mind. Going for the sake of going has been my normal. So, fair warning, you will begin seeing blogs about getting out into the world, because when we go, the camera (or, now, cameras) goes too. Photography was always a part of the roaming life for me, and the two combined remain one of my life’s great joys. 

Last weekend we took a ride up I40 to the Meadow community in Johnston County. It’s really kind of in the middle of nowhere, but as Raleigh grows it’s becoming closer to somewhere. We were there for the pie. Chocolate cream pie, to be precise. You see, the lovely and talented Lisa stops at the Meadow Restaurant for lunch on the way home from business meetings in Raleigh. She raves about the place, or, I should say, the pie. It’s a country buffet restaurant and the food is pretty standard country buffet food. The desserts, however, are amazing, especially the chocolate cream pie. It was killing Lisa that I’d never experienced this pie, so off we went to lunch, a few hours up the interstate to a crossroads in the Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina. As one does. 

Lisa had heard from someone that there was a Meadow Museum. We’re suckers for museums and a museum named for a town that isn’t even actually a town and that contains exactly one restaurant, one gas station, one fertilizer store and said museum……well, we had to go. It did not disappoint. Neither, by the way, did the pie.

I’ll write more about our photo-tour of this museum another day, but for now I’m bringing this back to those road trips of my youth. My favorite trip was the drive to Florida. One of the best things about driving to Florida from Pennsylvania is watching out for the increasing numbers of South of the Border signs as you approach the NC-SC state line and that glorious piece of roadside kitsch. Most of the signs feature Pedro, the South of the Border mascot who would, I’m sure, be considered a bit problematic today. He’s a caricature of a Mexican guy and he’s the king of bad Spanish-English puns. Here today, gone tamale and stuff like that. And the signs worked. By the time you’d passed your hundredth one, how could you NOT stop? And stop we did. Never to eat (my dad said he’d eaten a burrito there once before I was born and it almost killed him) nor, heaven forbid, to sleep in their motels, but we’d browse the junky gift shop and I’d beg for fireworks. It was great. 

How’s this relate to the Meadow Museum? As it turns out, the man who owns the museum once worked for the Department of Transportation and he’s gathered some discarded highway signs, including those advertising South of the Border. These weren’t the huge billboards with the puns, but they were classic and looked exactly like South of the Border signs were supposed to look and they brought me right back to the back seat of our station wagon rolling down I95 to go see Mickey.

I had the old 35mm Petri film camera because Lisa asked to use the mirrorless that day. It was the perfect camera and it was loaded with Kodak Gold 200, the iconic vacation color print film. I’m going to say that there’s not a better way to shoot old South of the Border signs than with a 1960s vintage camera and Kodak Gold. 

Three of the signs were outside and one was inside, but there was plenty of light and the film has incredible exposure latitude. It’s hard to screw it up, really. I’m very happy with the images I brought back. They remind me of my childhood and of our return to the road after this past horrible year, so they serve double duty of making me happy. 

That Old Time Film Look

 Ever have an idea in your head of something, creatively, that’s you’d like to bring to life and you sort of bumble your way towards that idea without really knowing if you’re on the right track or not until all of the sudden exactly what you’d been hoping for happens? That’s the feeling I got when these photos appeared on the first roll of color film I developed myself.

I bought the Petri 7S rangefinder camera I used because I wanted to try a rangefinder camera and because I had this notion of recreating the sort of vibe of the vacation photos of my childhood. Having seen how the old folding Brownie produced photos that just have the feel of 100 years ago, no matter what the subject, I thought getting a camera from the early 70s might do the same sort of thing. 

This idea was brought on at least partly by Walt Disney World’s 50th birthday. We are incredibly happy that Lisa and I will be joining a couple friends in the Magic Kingdom on October 1st, the actual 50th anniversary of the park’s opening. I thought it would be fun to bring back photos of the event that had the feel of photos taken 50 years ago. 

So after running a roll of black and white through the Petri and finding that it seemed to be working just fine, I ordered some Kodak Gold 200, a pretty classic-looking consumer grade film, and headed out to see what I could do. Luckily, I live at a vacation spot so taking “vacation pictures” with my old camera and vacation film wasn’t a challenge. 

We headed out to the pier because nothing says vacation like the beach, right? I love the top of these two photos above, but the beach photo was the one that let me know I’d bumbled right into completely nailing what I was after. That could have been taken in 1972. I am so happy.

This is also the first roll of color film I’ve ever developed myself, and it turned out great. I’ll write another blog about the process, but it wasn’t hard at all. And it gave me all of this!

I even tried a few portraits, because what are vacation photos without the people? Focusing the rangefinder close up is weird and takes a bit of time and practice. I’m finding that the exposure meter in the camera is pretty trustworthy, though. I couldn’t be happier with these photos of the lovely Miss Lisa (before and after her first post-plague haircut).

That top one really has me excited. The light coming in is great without blowing out and the out of focus background is just perfect. Managing to get the Petri 7S version with the 1.8 aperture lens is going to prove fortunate, I think. 

Over all, I’m super excited. This little camera will be just what I wanted and I think the Gold 200 will be perfect. I have a roll of Kodak’s more pro-grade color film in there now, so we’ll see how that turns out. It is supposed to give more realistic colors, but that isn’t what I’m looking for in every case. Figuring out which film is right for which project will be a fun experience.