I had originally intended to take my new Argoflex 75 for a spin around downtown Toledo… then I discovered that it had a stuck shutter. So, since I had my heart set on a photo walk, I loaded up the Holga and took it out over my lunch break, instead.
I’d never tried using the rectangular mask for the Holga; up until this photo walk, I’d only used either of my Holgas with the square mask. One thing that threw me off was having to remember that my photos would be vertical, not horizontal. I forgot several times. Sometimes, it totally screwed up the composition — but not often, since the viewfinder is apparently more of a general suggestion as to the composition of the actual photo (i.e. the actual lens is considerably wider of an angle than the viewfinder would lead one to believe).
I also learned that — surprise! — focusing to infinity with the Holga is pointless. I should just stop using the infinity focus on any of my lo-fi / box / toy cameras, since it always comes out unfocused. Half of the roll was either poorly composed (vertical, oops) or out-of-focus due to me having focused to infinity.
I did find a few places I’m going to have to visit again, like the Manos community garden and a couple of murals that my unfortunate focus and composition issues failed to do justice on this roll.
Definitely enjoying getting out into downtown, getting away from my normal “test roll” repeatable compositions, and discovering that downtown really isn’t a scary place to walk alone — especially not in broad daylight.
I learned about the Voigtländer Brilliant while I was doing a little research on TLRs and pseudo-TLRs. I’d read that the Voigtländer Brilliant V6 was the basis for the LOMO Lubitel TLR, so of course I wanted to get one. Alas, I jumped the gun on an eBay auction without reading carefully and ended up buying the second metal model, rather than the bakelite V6 I’d been wanting.
I picked up the Brownie Reflex 20 for about $12 at a local antique mall back in July. I have a thing for Brownies, and for pseudo-TLRs, especially ones that have a zone focus rather than fixed.
When I first bought this camera from the antique mall some eight years ago, I didn’t own any other 620 cameras — and even if I’d had an extra couple of 620 spools handy, it hadn’t even occurred to me to try respooling 120 film onto a 620 spool. I managed to run two rolls of 35mm through the camera to try some 