After finding all the overlapping in the last half roll of Lomo Berlin Kino that I shot for Holga Week, I wondered if film thickness was to blame. Berlin Kino is perhaps 2% thicker than normal film and maybe the camera got fooled somehow? I somehow didn’t think to check the first test rolls for overlapping (FPP RetroChrome 160, Kodak ProImage 100 both normal sorts of commercial film). Ends up, they didn’t overlap at all.
Anyway. I happened to load a roll of FPP Derev Pan 400 into the Minolta Vista Panorama one day and noticed how incredibly thin that film is, and so quickly grabbed the other roll I had and stuffed it into the 135BC…
How did it do? Well… there was no overlapping, anyway.
I started the roll on a trip out to the Grapevine Lake photospot. My darling, adorable wife and I hadn’t been out there in months, and wanted to see how much the lake was down.
Wow… The vignetting is super-pronounced. SubhanAllah.
The lake was down enough to get down to the tree tunnel thing, but still quite high. As usual, for me, I forgot to check focus and so what could’ve been decent shots often came out wrong…
The camera also has a pronounced light leak on the top side somewhere. I don’t mind it too much, and for critical work, I probably wouldn’t use the Holga 135BC anyway.
After that, the camera languished for weeks, until Mom came into town for Thanksgiving, and I shot up the rest of the roll at my brother-in-law’s place… with the B/N switch on B. It seems that switch has gotten quite loose. I found it on B several times, switched to N, and ten minutes later, once again found it on B…
I got some really decent pictures out of it, really. These two, of my nephew Daniyal, and niece, Ayesha, really knock me out.
But, really, it was a largely a fail. I mean, I didn’t think it was possible to make bad pictures of a cat…
And that was it… Meh.
By the way, I developed these in Ilfotec HC, dilution H (1:63) for 10.5 minutes.
The shot of the roll, for me, came from the session at Grapevine Lake. I looked down and spotted a pull tab… It was like being a kid again. These things used to litter gutters and lakesides, but I hadn’t seen one in the wild in decades. I was tempted to pick it up and put it on the keychain or stick it in a drawer for posterity, but, really, who cares.
Then, when I scanned the film and started processing, this shot popped right out… it looks like something from the Moon landing, some proof that it was shot elsewhere or something. (Of course, the Moon landing really did happen: the technology to beam video back to earth for live broadcast existed; the technology to film a length of cinema that long did not exist, even for Kubrick, and there are no splices in the video… I’m all for conspiracy theories, in theory, but many are just too much.)
And that was my experience with a roll of Derev Pan 400 in the Holga 135BC. No overlaps, and still plenty of Holgaliciousness.
