in may 2011 I was after an image for the lomography turns on time machine exhibition. the submission deadline was coming up fast and I had nothing that would fit the bill, so I decided to take the holga out for a session – I hadn’t used the holga for some months. I asked dear Kalli to pose for some portraits, and she agreed.

of course, I can never do a photo session without carrying at least three cameras (I have to find a cure for this), so I brought along the minolta xd-7 fitted with the 50mm/f1.4 lens as well as a medium format pinhole camera.

we shot two medium format films and maybe half a roll of the polypan f 50 which was loaded in the minolta – I never seem to be able to finish a 36-frame roll in a single session. I developed the two medium format films in the following days, but the 35mm film wasn’t finished – when I did finish it, a couple of weeks later, I was too bored to develop it by itself (small developing tanks can fit two 35mm films) so I left it in the cupboard, waiting to do for another roll of the same film – which, of course, I didn’t do until October.

…we arrived at a beach near Rafina with a couple of hours until sunset – the low sensitivity of the film (50 ASA) meant that if I stopped down the aperture I would get nice blurry images…

…it was a glorious day (although not quite summer yet), quite windy, and the beach was totally empty. Kalli set out to get some seashells and I just followed her around with the camera…

…then I started setting up the scene I wanted – I had re-used the clock in a close up image a couple of years ago and now I wanted a scene with the clock in the foreground and Kalli fading away in the foreground…

…but since this was a lomography exhibition, I needed to make this image with the holga – this is the resulting medium format image, shot on fuji acros 100 – quite different because of the holga’s bigger depth of field, the softness of its lens and the inherent low contrast of the film (fuji acros is a magnificent “slow” film)…

…the holga went back in the bag, its job done, and I continued fooling around with the shallow depth of field of the 50mm/f1.4 – the small 35mm format and this high-contrast, high-grain film make a nice combination against the setting sun.

I tried printing the last photo in the darkroom and it came out pretty nice – this film is a pleasant surprise, especially when you consider that it is a movie film, sold in 90 meter reels, quite thin (it has a polyester base) and costing something like 22€ for the 90m reel on ebay, resulting in a price of less than half a euro for a 36-frame roll.

in the mountain villages above xylokastro

road tripping in eyvoia

in donousa

last frame to finish the roll before development

when it arrived, I loaded it up with a roll of long-expired agfa apx 100 and took a couple of weeks to finish 24 exposures (I can never finish a roll on time, heh). developed the film, scanned it and then… forgot about it… until yesterday: as I was looking through my files to compile a new portfolio on urban landscapes, I came across this film, so I decided to clean up some frames and put them on my blog. On to the images now.

…first I took this little camera on a walking tour around marousi: kifissias avenue, agios thomas and the sideroads of attiki odos. didn’t give a lot of thought to the stuff I was photographing, really, since I was trying to finish a roll as soon as possible and see the resulting images.

…and then we went to rafina, to explore the spring seaside – a lot of good images were waiting for me there but I was preoccupied with the lomographic society’s upcoming ”time machine” exhibition and I was trying to get the best out of my holga – the resulting image was a good compensation.

…aaaand, that’s all folks. I don’t think I’ll keep this one, it’s very similar (but less wide angle) to my vivitar ultra wide & slim, and I wasn’t really impressed with the panoramic mode. It crops a lot of film and the remaining film area is not enough for a decent scan and big enough prints. I’d prefer to throw some hundred euros in the direction of a 6×9 medium format camera than cope with cropped 35mm film.