...don't you just love it when you develop a roll of film months after it was shot and you see images that you had forgotten all about..? 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.