The "HOLGA" Toy Camera

For those of you not in the know I will start off by explaining what a Holga is. A Holga s a low cost mass production camera made of mostly plastic which is a designed based on late 80s and early 90s toy cameras. The Holga is a minimalist camera there are only 2 states to choose from when shooting 1/100th f8 and 1/100th f16 any other light control comes from film iso selection there is also bulb but that is not viable for what I want to shoot with this camera. That is not where it stops this camera is also manual focus range finder with no focusing screen so you cant tell when its in focus but instead use a zone system which mean you shoot a small aperture and make a best guess on how far what your shooting is. The Holga that I have is a medium wide format camera that shoots 6x12 which is two times the frame size compared to most other 120 medium format cameras. The price is what makes up for all of its short comings the 6x12 that I’ve got cost only 99 dollars that is several thousand less than a proper made camera in this format. I came into possession of this camera in late 2025 and have been trying to shoot with it and figuring it out this camera has been an up hills both ways situation. First the camera has massive light leaks, so bad it leaked the entire frame of my first two rolls. And when shooting film you do not know that you have a issue until after you develop your film which can be days. Anyway Ive solved the light leaking issue using a few feet of gaff tape over the camera back. So I shot two more rolls and one way or another I had the shutter set to bulb and had every frame of those two rolls over exposed by 4 stops or so and a few that you could still make out had significant motion blur. So now I think I have everything figured out and went to shoot some easy test shots around town to just get something real quick I shot them with black and white so I could develop them same day so I could fix the next thing that went wrong but to my surprise I got some good frames almost every frame you could make out what was shot and some were even what I would call sharp considering the camera being used. The photos below are 35mm Illford hp5 running the 35mm film in the 120 6x12 makes a 2x12 which I'm calling super panos.

Jack C Fisher park Owensboro KY 2025 HOLGA Panoramic 120 camera Illford HP5 35mm film

Blue Bridge and river front Owensboro KY 2025 HOLGA Panoramic 120 camera Illford HP5 35mm film

St. Louis Trip

I had the opportunity to tag-along on a trip to St. Louis and get a sort of private tour from a local there. We stopped at two small camera shops as well as the famous arch. We went to both of the camera shops first. While at one of the camera shops my eyes locked on to a 28-70mm f2.8 zoom with silent wave motor in perfect condition and I had to check it out. I've had my eye on this exact lens for years. The shop sold me on buying a roll of kodak gold to shoot with my new lens so we were off to the arch. To be honest the arch is maybe the most boring thing to take photos of but since its a popular spot there would be people there and hopefully they would be doing something interesting. Under the arch there were two women posing to line up the arch in the back ground to look like they were holding up the arch. The thing that caught my eye was the yellow shirt since I'm shooting color now I could actually capture the yellow shirt. When color grading all of the images from that day they are all blue cast which I think is caused by the color film being daylight balanced. In black and white you can kind of just ignore color balance and get along okay for the most part but in color its a vital consideration for the final image and I was unable to tone it out on the digital side after scanning. I didn't finish shooting the roll while in St. Louis so finished it up by getting photos of our cats the orange one is Gingy and I caught him sleeping in our bed the image I got is magenta-y so I think this is also a daylight color balance issue so I'll be getting at least a color filter for indoor light if I shoot more color film. The second cat I caught about to get into her napping spot in the bay window is Jazzy she loves napping there but I think she was confused what I was doing in her spot with my camera. The color of this image seems a lot closer to what I would expect from a digital color image but the white balance still seems off and I cant place it. The color may be just the “film look” and its been a few years since I've shot color so I'm not sure what to expect. This is also, the first time I've scanned my own color film so there may have been an error or poor choice of light for scanning. Anyways out of 36exp these are the four I think are acceptable with Jazzy's photo being the best.

Nikon F90X 80-200mm F2.8 Kodak Gold 200

Nikon F90X 80-200mm F2.8 Kodak Gold 200

Nikon F90X 28-80 F2.8 Kodak Gold 200

Nikon F90X 28-80 F2.8 Kodak Gold 200

Cyanotype Continued

For take two I have a much better understanding of exposure times. The lights I am using are very weak and need a 15 to 35 minute exposure to get any tonal range. I also switched to using some shots that were taken with Illford hp5 400 pushed to 3200 these negatives are very thin which also made the exposure times shorter closer to 20 minutes. The first image is contact print from that film in negative sleeves and it was a huge success the resolution is extremely impressive considering how small a 35mm negative is. Illford hp5 has a bar code like control strip along the sprocket holes and you can see how accurate the and tight the print is. The second image is a more creative print. seeing the live edge of the first test and seeing the resolution I was able to get made me think about painting the sensitized solution on in a more abstract way to add a interesting live edge for the rest of the negatives on the sleeve to trail off into. Seeing this print come to life in the development bath caused me to become awestruck everything lined up so perfectly. This print just went from a test to something that I want to frame even though its a very small print. Ive done many contact prints from several other sheets and now Ive got the itch to print something larger.

Analog Printing Test "cyanotype"

Cyanotype is an alt process for film photography. It's an alt process because the primary process is Silver Gelatin Printing which will give you classic black and white photographic prints and requires a dark room with the iconic red safety lights. Although similar the cyanotype is has some key differences first the paper its available prepared but most often its is created by the printer. This process I can only explain as alchemy you take potassium ferricyanide (a dark almost black sol.) and ferric ammonium citrate (a vibrant orange sol.) and mix them together to form pleasant olive colored solution this is referred to the sensitized solution. So in a iconic dark room the red lights are a particular red that the silver gelatin paper is not reactive to so you can see and work under this light. The cyanotype is similar but it is most reactive to 380mm uv light and uvb/uvba light in general meaning you can work under most normal room lighting since they do not put out uv light. This is why I became interested in cyanotype since I could work in my house with out making a full on dark room and could work just under normal light in my living room. Anyways below is my first cyantotype if you dont count the first three being so under exposed that they developed to a brilliant white. I put the sensitized solution on arches 140lb cold press water color paper which already has nice sizing so I opted to not size the paper with arrow root starch. I exposed some shots of 120 I shot while on a trip in an old Pentax 6x7. I developed with tap water and hit it with hydrogen peroxide to oxidize the print the last step isn’t needed as you can oxidize it over time in the air but this speeds everything up. The print isn't anything noteworthy but you can see an image and I'll just take it as a win not having 4 blank squares on it. Well I have a lot to learn which is clear to me now.

Contact print of kodak tri-x 400 120 film shot on a Pentax 6x7 developed in Rodinal

Haircut Day

Its hair cut day. Its been a long journey and hair cuts have not always been easy the buzz from the clippers was just to much, but now we can even get a design buzzed into the side of our head without even flinching. For this shoot I used two rolls of TRI-X 400 pushed to 3200 the shots came out nice lots of contrast but the negatives have a pretty heavy haze in the center of the film. I think this was caused my using the agitator instead of doing inversions every minute. Personally I dont mind it too much the haze lines up and works for a lot of the shots so its not a issue. Id rather have a more clean negative but at least it works this time.

Crop Harvest Day

Since its fall now in my area, that means its time to harvest the corn that has been growing all summer. Finding farmers at work can be difficult since they run on their own time. We stopped at the seed shop at around five o'clock to ask where they might be harvesting at and the clerk said they were headed to the west field the last she heard this morning. So we made our way down the winding country roads to see what we could find. There were several combines working the fields along with a Case Quadtrac Tractor which was pulling a hopper to help with unloading. These photos were shot with TRI-X 400 with standard development in D76. Using this developer at standard time gives a low contrast negative which is perfect for the darkroom being as you can use high contrast paper when printing. For these images I scanned them with a DSLR which gives an image that I find lacking in contrast and editing on the digital scan does not do the same as using high contrast paper. In the future I will try some other developers. Right now I am considering Rodinal or Kodak HC-110 these developers give a higher contrast under normal development time but so does pushing film. I liked the look of pushed TRI-X 400 but experimentation is needed.

A Case Quadtrac pulls a hopper across a field being harvested by two combines in rural Henderson Kentucky.

A John Deer tractor pulling a hopper is being loaded by a combine.

TRI-X pan 400 push to 3200 test

A very close friend decided to get into shooting film. So I convinced him to get a 35mm camera to shoot with and told him that if he went in 50-50 on chemistry that I would teach him how to develop his film. When I was shooting film last I was experimenting with pushing film so to pick up where I left off I decided to shoot a roll of Kodak TRI-X pan 400 pushed to 3200 which is about 3 stops. For this shoot I did an indoor shoot of my kid while my fiancé was helping to transcribe several old books. During this he decided that he need to wear his Gran’s reading glasses. I was able to capture the moment he was telling everyone why he needed to wear them. The camera I used is a Nikon n90s and most likely the 80-200 f2.8. For developing I used d76 stock sol. for 25min with normal times for stop fixer and wash. The contrast that comes from pushing is amazing and the grain of TRI-X shines as well soon I will push a roll of Illford HP5 400 and see how that looks but there might be more guessing for development times.

Building new frames for old work

a local barber shop offered to let me hang some of my art up but needed to frame the panting I had sitting around. so I picked up two very clear one by eights from the lumber yard I was lucky to find such clear poplar. I was able to make both frames in two days which is pretty fast work going from one by to finished frame. I have to talk about the frame I bought from a local art box store was a 16x20 and I was going to same some time. the frame cost 24 dollars and actually fell apart while putting it together with my watercolor I don’t know how they can get way with selling something with such poor quality. but anyways it was nice to get back into the art flow of framing and matting my work.

Mama Goose 2025

Red Lady 2020

Watercolor Sketches

It has been a long time since I’ve updated my blog, but I have been painting, even more so than usual so I’m going to try and get caught up uploading them. The other day I decided to do some small loose sketches since I haven’t painted smaller than 11x14in in a while and its refreshing to paint on 4x6in and its even challenging to work such a small space. I painted a pear which turns out to be a page on Instagram of a pear trying to get 200k likes so ill @ him when I post it on insta. The next is a bonsai tree that’s part of a long series of freehand sketches. And the last is a very loose cityscape that is inspired by Winslow homer and Sargent two watercolor artist that inspire me.

Ocean Ride

Since I don’t have any art project in the works, I’m writing about my bikes rides for a while. This weekend we’re on vacation in North Carolina about 27 miles from the ocean front and decided to take a ride down to the beach and go for a swim. The entire ride was on small one-foot wide shoulders but there weren’t any rumble strips so it was easy to get used to riding just to the right of the white line of the road. Justin almost gave up but he made it. I averaged 14.5 miles per hour with a top speed of 30 mph #hillbomb

Bike chilling on the beach, shot on Samsung Galaxy s8

Testing the Gas Burner

Finally I’ve gotten the gas burner in the mail from Laguna Clay. Its a venturi burner meaning that it works on gas pressure to draw in the proper amount of air for burning controlled trough a choke. when it came in the mail I couldn’t wait to test fire it, as soon as i opened the box and picked up that 11 lb monster of a burner. in the photos the burner is running at 15 PSI about half way turned up and putting our about 355,000 BTU just an insane amount of heat. The entire tool shop was heated up in just a few minutes pretty impressive since it was about 25 degrees on that day. over all the test fire was a success and will be used in the final kiln design parried with a 100lb propane tank so it wont freeze up while firing.

8ft flames shooting from the burner

low pressure hose, from left, high pressure regulator, venturi B-4 burner

2 PSI reduction flame

Watercolors

A bonsai tree I water-colored the other day it didn’t take long to lay all of the color down but in the end looks really nice. letting the water just fall onto the paper has a nice look being careless but precise at the same time. Ill be painting many more of these.

Bonsai tree watercolor 2019

Toucan Watercolors

I dont have any reason other than the fact that toucans are cool colorful little birds that are easy for me to paint. I guess it was a good practice in mixing power colors like bright orange, green and vibrant red.

Toucan Watercolor 2019

Watercolors just finished

this is a nude figure i painted in class the other day. its an upper level class but still got some reactions like come on were art majors we have all taken the class where you draw naked people for two hrs straight everyday for like six months.

nude figure model unknown (source Fackbook)

More Watercolors

This is my third and fourth assignments for watercolor. The first is a giraffe eating from a high branch. Here I am still getting a hold of hew that water and pigment works with the paper and how that affects the wash of the water color. The paper I am using is Canson watercolor paper 140LB and to me the paper just does not absorb the water right. I put the brush down and anything more than a little bit of water pools at the surface making it hard to do large washes of color like in the sky. The second water color is a twilight scene that shows the milky way in the very early hours of rising. For this painting I used Arches Watercolor paper 300LB cold press this paper is about as thick as a piece of foam core or mat-board; when you put a wet brush to it the paper just soaks up all the pigment from it. This truly is the best paper I use even giving Canson a shot since its half the price. The next paper I will be trying is Strathmore 400 140LB paper to see if that could be an alternative to Arches 300LB paper.

Giraffe Water color 2019

Nights Sky 2019

Watercolors

This is my watercolor technical sheet its our first project in watercolor class. The objective is to make a color wheel while only using the primary colors to make every color. We’re going to do this a few times over the semester to practice technical skills. The next is a water color of Monster Cats 014 album cover only to practice inking along with water color sort of a water color sketch by classic water color definition. For class I’m going to up load two water colors a week at least and ill finish off with four 22x30in water colors.

Watercolor technical (color wheel, grey scale, color intensity scale)

Watercolor of Monster Cat 014 album cover

Final Render

This is my final render of my blender doughnut. So, there are not sprinkles sad face but, trying to figure out the hair simulation to place the sprinkles was troublesome for me so further work is needed. Another reason this is my final render is that early on I made poor choices on how I made my assets. In blender you have a few things that control how smooth an item its poly (the actual object) and filters you can use to edit that object. So basically, I made the poly of the glass plate really high to get rid of some artifacts that could have been fixed by render settings the problem is that to change the poly I would have to get rid of the object and rebuild it. That’s not impossible but would take a lot of time so I’m just going to move on and do some other things that I want to do. Learning is the important part of following this tutorial.

dough nut render 2018.

Blender Tutorial

Over the past week I have been following a tutorial by Blender Guru. The reason I chose his tutorial to follow over some of the others out there is that Blender Guru has good working practices like teaching non-destructive workflow which can help your working and editing work flow. If you’re in the final stages and must make a small edit a destructive work flow could cause you to remodel your entire project causing you to waste time. Also, his tutorial is open, he makes you do your own work which help you remember how to do things and when you encounter a problem solving it on your own is a good way to learn problem solving something you need at every point of your life not just in art.

The idea of making a doughnut sort of still belongs to Blender Guru but at every point I could I choose a different thing to model from like the cup is modeled from a different photo with a different shape. Second the plate is modeled from one in my house and a textured as glass rather than ceramic in the tutorial. So, this is an unfinished rendered image and hopefully next week ill have a finished render to show off.

4K 3D render from blender.

Film Photography

This year at Brescia I was able to visit Russ Young in Floyd Virginia to expand my knowledge of film photography and learn how to make prints in the dark room. While I was there I seven rolls of film and made four or five good prints. The process is simple put chemical A on paper then B then C in that order for the right amount of time, but i wanted to understand more and know how to pick chemicals out on my own. I decided on D76 as the developer, stop bath, Fixer, and Dektol all Kodak brand chemicals because they are still being made and easy to find. The film I use is Tmax or Tri-x both black and white Kodak films. The main thing you need for making prints is an enlarger, its a device use to enlarge smaller 35mm film to as big as 16in by 20in prints. Using an enlarger is not an easy task it you need to follow directions that arn't always straight forward i wont try to explain it but you have to set the contrast filter inside of the enlarger to print on certain grades of paper. After learning all of this i got the dark room at Brescia working and started making prints there and I plan to continue after i can afford more chemicals, paper and film. 

Russ Young in the Floyd Country Store 2017.

Russ Youngs dark room.