type dom

Some people take photos of something they’ve seen. I prefer to take photos of something I haven’t.

Holga 135BC + 15B Flash

So I recently bought into another hobby: analogue photography. Or, more specifically, lomography. According to the International Lomographic Society, Lomography is “about being in the moment, capturing it with your favourite lomographic tool”, which is a bit of a terrible description. To me, lomography is about using lo-fi analogue (film) cameras to take interesting photos.

The lomo camera I have is the Holga 135BC. The original Holga camera (Holga 120S) is a plastic camera that was designed in China in the 1980s. It’s a fairly simple and cheap camera that uses a plastic lens and tends to have light leaks (which is generally a bad thing for a film camera), but it became popular due to the charm of the photos that it produced. With strong vignetting, soft focus and almost non-functioning controls, the randomness and unpredictability of the camera eventually garnered a cult following and is now one of the more popular cameras in the lomography movement. The Holga 120 series uses the 120 Medium Format Film, which tends to be a bit rarer and more expensive today. To help compensate for this, they released the Holga 135 series, which uses the more common 35mm film format (which is a more consumer friendly format). My specific model, the Holga 135BC, attempts to capture the same vignetting that the original 120 had.

Now the features of the camera are actually fairly bad. It cost around $50 on eBay and you essentially get what you pay for. It has a plastic lens, which is cheap but not terribly great at taking photos. The camera has two aperture settings Sunny (f/11) and Cloudy (f/8), but on most cameras this switch pretty much does nothing (and you end up with a aperture around f/13). It has a focus ring that ranges from 1 person (1m distance), 2 persons (2m), many persons (6m) and mountains (10m+), but the 135BC has a fairly short depth of field, so you end up guessing anyway. The shutter is unhooked from the film advance, meaning it is quite easy to do double exposures on the camera, with purposefully or accidentally. The camera body is notorious for light leaks, particularly in the film counter at the top, meaning you have to tape it up if you don’t want those distorting your photos (you can see my black tape on the top of the camera).

So why buy into film photography? Especially with a crappy, cheap camera. And with Kodak recently announcing bankruptcy, it seems like a very bad time to do so.

Well firstly, look at the photos it takes:

And these were the crappy photos I took on my first roll. You can see more in the flickr group or on the Lomography website.

The other reason is a bit more philosophical. A lot of the lomography website preach the lifestyle, taking happy snaps on run, embracing creativity and integrating the whole concept of lomography into your life. I’m not exactly one for all of that. But I am attracted to the randomness and mystery of it all. One of the consequences of a digital world is that you tend to know exactly what you’re going to get from things, because ultimately digital things always have discreet results. There’s so much control and choice that you end up drowning in it all and it saps the fun out. And because you have so much control, if something bad occurs, it is your fault because you had control over it. I’ve grown up learning not to fail. And I like to think I’ve gotten quite good at that.

But with this camera and with its randomness, you have to embrace failure. My first film roll was meant to have 36 shots. I ended up with about 14 that actually developed and less that were usable. This is, in some fashion, my method of accepting failure and learning to become more resilient. Very philosophical. But what better reason to pick up a hobby than to be philosophical in its reasoning and with the aim to improve oneself?

The other reason for buying this camera was that, generally, to take interesting photos you have to go out to interesting places and do interesting things, something I have failed to do of late (to the detriment of the posts on this blog). And since this camera is very light hungry, I may have to go to places outside to find interesting things. I’ve always kind of been interested in photography, but never really gotten into it. A lot of photographers I know tend to be the artsy types with the big, thick framed glasses and trendy clothing. Or they’re the slightly nerdy but super technical types who lug around huge cameras with a bajillion addons that cost just as many bajillion dollars. But they all take these amazingly brilliant photos that are exposed correctly and composed to exactness. And I can’t match them. I don’t have the eye for it. So I chose to take the path less taken (because Robert Frost is a continual inspiration for the hipster in me) and go the analogue route. I may not take good photos, but that’s not my fault. It’s the camera’s. But I may, through pure accident, take some interesting photos. And maybe, just maybe, taking interesting photos in interesting places of interesting things will make me an interesting person.

Because I’m terribly uninteresting right now. :o

For most people, the new year really starts the first day they get back to work. For me, the real first day of the year is the day I fill in my diary.

My infamous diary. The thing that keeps me organised. It is perhaps the most pedantic and OCD ritual that I undertake every year for the past 5 years. Nothing really starts in my year until I do my prep my diary for the coming year.

I use a Moleskine Weekly Notebook Diary/Planner (Soft Cover) for my diary every year. While my opinion on Moleskine has declined rapidly over the last few years (particularly in regard to the quality of their paper, their mass marketing and mass acceptance, and the new collaborations that pseudo-personalise a notebook that is entirely meant to be based off of tradition), I have gotten used to the format of this weekly planner and tradition/routine dictates that I must continue with its use. It ain’t cheap either, coming in at over $30. But I’ve never had one break or fail on me so far and they last a year getting knocked around in my bag, so I think the investment is worth it.

A few people have been able to see inside of my diary to check various dates and things on the calendar, but few really know how pedantic it actually is. To begin with, I fill it with every important date that I can think of at the start of the year. This includes public holidays, important dates for uni (such as semester starts, last day for enrollment, census day, VC week, exam timetable release, exam period, results released, etc.), people’s birthdays, etc. This year marks the first time I haven’t written down every other uni’s important dates as well (it used to be useful for organising things with the anime club and friends from other uni’s). But the real pedantic nature comes out with the way these dates are written.

This year, I’ve refined my system for date entry into my diary. All general events that happen and don’t really have much impact on me (such as people’s bday, public holidays and whatnot) are written on the right column of the day (except for weekends of course) in black ink. Any events that I have to do something for or directly influence me are written on the left column in blue. Really stupidly important dates are written in all caps in red on the left column. For example, if someone was to have a birthday on the 7th of June but their birthday party was on the 10th of June, their birthday would be in black on the 7th and in blue on the 10th. Also, just as another general guideline, I don’t like other people writing in my diary. I can only think of at most 3 people who have written in my diary. One of them was me.

Now, its not just about writing dates down. Since I like to carry my diary pretty much wherever I go, I like to gear it out a little. On the front cover, I have at least 4 post-it notes (Super Sticky kind, the normal ones or alternate brands generally don’t have enough adhesive to stick for the whole year) in 3 different colours. These are used to write down details of events and other things to be used in the diary. If you’re unfamiliar with Moleskine’s, they have a little pocket on the back cover. In this back pocket I have 4 paper clips, 4 index cards, 3 bandaids and the original text insert that came with the diary. I like to throw in any other things I find useful in the back, like $6.40 (which is the price of a return ticket on the train) or membership/discount cards that I might use.

This year, I’ve also decided to back up my date entries through a Google Calendar that syncs to my iPhone and iPad now, so I now have data redundancy should I ever lose my diary. And all of this is just for piece of mind, since I generally remember EVERYTHING anyway without the need to look it up. But why do this then? Why go through so much effort? Well I refer to Field Notes and their motto for why I do this:

I’m not writing it down to remember it later,
I’m writing it down to remember it now.

And I think that makes it all worth it.