The 2020 edition of Holga Week took place October 1-7. I shot two rolls during the week in my Holga 120N: some expired (and I believe water damaged) Portra 400VC, and a some Ilford FP4+. These are my picks from the 24 frames.
The 400VC went first, and I shot most of the roll in a park in Richland Hills Texas on the Sunday morning. Shooting has been really hard during this never-ending pandemic thing. Thankfully, I got through all of Holga Week before all the politics stuff really crawled up on me. I’m not sure I could even find the interest in anything to take the lens cap off, let alone trip the shutter these days.
Anyway. I started the roll around the house, and took it on a drive to do some contact-less pick-up at the local home improvement retailer.
I dropped the camera and the back popped open on my way out the door, then I finished the roll in the park on Sunday. (Or was it Saturday? The days run together.)
(I’m not sure I got the color right… I’ll get into that below, maybe.)
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to, but I loaded up a roll of FP4, and then didn’t go anywhere for the rest of Holga Week, so the entire roll got shot in and around the house. Woo.
All in all, it was a good time, I suppose, until I started trying to process the DSLR scans of that roll of Portra 400VC and remembered how much trouble previous scanning attempts went for that film. I thought it was me, but think I discovered evidence of undisclosed water damage.
That big splotch extending from out of frame on the left side, in a sort of slanted blob shape to the bottom middle looks like the film was pressed up against something that caused some damage. It could be that I made an error when loading the film onto the spool, and that’s probably it, but I’ve had similar issues getting good color out of my scans with the other rolls I’ve shot.
I’ll put the last one through a solid camera, the Yashica-Mat, maybe, or the LC-A 120, and then maybe send it off for processing just to see what someone else’s scans look like.
So that was my Holga Week for 2020. I don’t expect to win any prizes for any of this garbage, but who knows. I didn’t expect to win in 2017 for my fair ground picture either, but I did, so maybe the overgrown carousel will stir some emotions this time? It seems apt for 2020, somehow…
