A Gift to.my Future Self.

Sometimes the only thing to do is grab a Holga and go for a walk.

I needed to get out of the house. I'd been working on the laptop all blooming day and just needed to be outside. When this happens, the likelihood of returning with a roll of portfolio-standard pictures is pretty remote, but that's OK.

You can go out and just snap the things you notice. The things that catch your eye. There doesn't have to be a plan, a project or even a particularly good reason for taking the photograph.

I loaded my Holga with a roll of Kentmere Pan 100 and headed out.

I'd configured the Holga for 645 mode, which meant I had 16 frames available to me. My Holga has been modified to have a genuine f/10 aperture. I'd also taped a yellow filter to the lens and screwed a lens hood into the filter.

My meter was suggesting 1/40th of a second at f/10. Add in the filter factor and the ISO 100 film really needed to be treated as though it were around ISO 200.

More accurately, given the very limited parameters you're stuck with on a Holga, the film needed a little more development than normal.

So I was out for nearly two hours and eventually returned home with a roll of film on which every frame had been exposed.

All 16 of them.

That's a small victory in itself.

This frame, in my opinion, was the best of the 16. It was the final frame on the roll and was little more than a grab shot.

Technically, it isn't perfect. But it has something else.

It has atmosphere.

I returned home looking forward to processing the film, and that's one of the great benefits of shooting film. You're gifting your future self a surprise.

You don't know exactly what you've got until you develop it.

Sometimes, that surprise is a technically imperfect photograph that somehow says more than you'd have imagined. 

And that is a win in my book.