Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Imitation Holga


Billie expressed concerns that she might not be able to get results equivalent to her previous very successful use of a Holga 120 film camera with her new Lensbaby Composer.

The above image was shot with the Composer, full frame camera, 5.6 cropped to square, masked along the edges and some blurring of a duplicate layer, then faded back with the layer slider. It looks a bit like a Holga image and perhaps with more work we could do better.

2 comments:

doonster said...

Seems like a lot of effort to imitate what a Holga does straight out of camera.

George Barr said...

That's certainly true, though for those of us totally digital, the hassles of dealing with film and a light leaky camera and the variable quality of the Holgas and lack of light meter and scanning film, oh, and dealing with dust, and lack of macro and so on, well I think many of us figure going back to Holga and film isn't worth the trouble. The time it took me to process the lensbaby image to imitate the holga was a fraction of the time it would take to remove dust from a holga negative.

None of this is to denegrate the whole Holga thing which with it's incredible simplicity is important to the work of some people, it just doesn't work for everyone.

As I haven't made a single image yet from the Lensbaby that I consider worthwhile (in owning it for four days), only time will tell if this whole thing is worth while but I'm quite intrigued by the challenge. I don't think there are a lot of really good Lensbaby images out there so if I can do something worth while and not gimicky, well that will be something, won't it.

More likely I'll fail miserably and move on to the next project, but that's ok too. The only real failures are when I don't try.

George