I got my Holga pictures back today. Most of them are lousy, a couple of them are good, and several of them are interesting. As part of my thirtieth birthday new-leaf-turning-over, I vowed to scan them immediately and post them to the web so that you good people could see them (and so I could mark that task off of my list.)

Sadly, the universe had other ideas. I have been wrestling with my borrowed scanner for over two hours now, and I still can't get it to do what I want. At one point I even employed an Xacto knife, a T-square, and a very surprised-looking piece of cardboard, but my efforts were to no avail. I still don't have any scans for you. As a consolation prize, I offer this picture of an emu I took last summer. It's a bad scan and it's not from a Holga, but it's all I have on hand at the moment.

I promise to keep working on the Holga pics, even if it means buying a scanner and cutting it up with my Xacto knife, which frankly sounds like sweet, sweet vengeance right now. If you happen to run into Mr. Epson on the street, please extend to him my undying enmity.

  Day off! I've heard that some people take the day off of work on their birthday; I've even heard of companies that give their employees a free day for this purpose. As a veteran of cash-strapped, workaholic Internet startups, this idea always seemed a little foreign to me. However, I felt that the additional angst associated with turning 30 (see previous entries) justified using one of my hard-earned vacation days. I like Fridays, so I decided to take Monday off instead.

The logical plan was to spend the day finishing my den-cleaning project and catching up on my chores after my busy weekend. Naturally, I rejected this idea immediately. I will be damned if I'm going to spend my vacation doing chores. If it means I have to live in a pig sty, then so be it. (As it turns out, that's exactly what it means. I'm not even sure that pigs could stand it in here right now. I keep imagining a pig walking in to my living room, looking around, and then walking right back out again, his nose turned up in disgust. For some reason, the pig is wearing a monocle and a top hat.)

Instead of being responsible, I decided to walk around Seattle and take pictures. This is something I always threaten to do, but somehow it never happens. The planets were in alignment today - the weather was perfect, and I had no book to read or Netflix movies to watch. I vowed that there would be no excuses, even though I stayed up until 2 AM working on the Stockstock web site and therefore had a perfectly good reason to stay at home and lounge. I was resolved. I woke up at 8 AM, checked my email, shaved, fell asleep on the couch briefly, got up again, took a shower, got dressed and left the house. I was having a Photo Day.

At first this might seem like a perfectly reasonable and possibly even slightly glamorous thing to do, which means that there has to be more to the story. First of all, I have a nine-month backlog of slides that are waiting to be printed, scanned, or otherwise dealt with. Wouldn't it make more sense to just stay home and get those taken care of before taking any more pictures? Yes, it would make sense, but I've already established that logic would find no quarter on this day. You will want to remember this point when I relate the next item, which is that my pictures for Photo Day would be taken with a $17 plastic camera from China.

I need you to know that I am an equipment person. I like shopping for it, I like buying it, and I like using it, which is why I have, among other things, a fairly nice autofocus SLR camera with a couple of decent lenses and many accessories totalling nearly $1 gajillion in value. I'm glad I have this equipment, because buying it reignited my interest in photography after several years of laying dormant.

It is this interest that led me to buy the Holga 120. When I said it's a plastic camera, I meant it - even the lens is plastic. The camera isn't very well put-together, either, which means that it will leak light if you don't apply liberal amounts of thick black tape to every visible surface, both inside and out. The other salient feature of this camera is that it has a fixed aperture and a fixed shutter speed. In short, you cannot change the exposure. You have to be sure that the picture you are taking is correctly exposed for f/8 and a 1/100th of a second shutter. If the light is wrong, you have to point the camera somewhere else. This is made more complicated by the fact that the camera doesn't have a light meter, so you really have no way of knowing whether the light is wrong or not. Using the Holga is like trying to go fishing by cutting a hole in your boat and hoping that an appropriately-sized fish will just swim through it and jump into your basket.

My Holga. That's right folks - it has a genuine Optical Lens! Note the aggressive taping job.

There's no autofocus on the Holga. Instead, you're supposed to use these little icons on the lens barrel to help judge the distance. The one on the left is supposed to be one person (a close up, ~3 feet), the next one is three people (~9 feet), then a bunch of people (~18 feet), and then a mountain (landscape shot - 30 ft - infinity).

Here's Matt preparing his new Holga for battle. You have to tape the back shut whenever you reload the camera, which makes using a Holga a very ritualistic, religious experience.

So why would I choose this piece of junk over my other camera? Partially because it's a fun, dorky thing to do, but mostly because, in the right hands (and with a little luck), the Holga can take hauntingly beautiful pictures. I don't know what it is - the fuzziness of the focus, the vignetting around the edges, whatever - but this camera can produce some luminous images. Check out the photos at this site and this site if you don't believe me.

Am I implying that I have the skill and artistry to turn out pictures like these? Certainly not. But it is the curse and the blessing of the photographer that when you see an image you like, you have to try and make it yourself. It was with this in mind that I drove to Seattle Center with my Holga, my new handheld light meter, a couple of cheap filters, several rolls of film, and one roll of black gaffer's tape. I took some pictures around the Space Needle, and then I went over to shoot the outside of EMP. It was really bright out and I quickly ran out of my slow outdoor film, so after lunch I headed to Glazer's to get some more. Matt called me just as I was leaving; he was in the area, so he came over and met me there. He didn't have his Holga with him, so he just bought another one. (For $17, it's hard to go wrong.) We went and poked around under I-90 overpasses, near railroad tracks, and along the pier at Fishermen's Wharf. I ended up shooting about four rolls of film. It was an extremely fun day.

I wish I had an ending to this story, but the film isn't developed yet. If any of the pictures actually come out, I will be sure to scan them and post them here so you can see the results for yourself.

If I stay true to form, that should happen about nine months from now.