grand central terminal

sometimes luck has a lot to do with the success of a picture - especially when that picture is taken with a holga.

i was up on the balcony with the camera sitting on the railing, the lens propped up by my keyless entry remote on my keyring, and i held the shutter open for about a second. after that i crossed my fingers and waited.



i keep finding myself drawn to symmetry and order in my pictures. i feel in a lot of ways like i'm taking portraits of places. showing the simple truth of what something is.

sometimes it's purely informational i.e. - "this building is here, i found it interesting, let me show you what i see" - and that's all. nothing groundbreaking in the way i take the picture, nothing to knock you off your seat, the subject just speaks for itself. and that's all it needs.

the photograph above is extremely symmetrical and orderly (despite the usual rush of the travelers and tourists), even down to the formation of the people in it - an inverted triangle with a single man at the bottom (looking at his phone or something) holding it all together and drawing your eyes up and into the gorgeous space of the grand central terminal.

i'm grateful that he held still for that one second.

happy halloween!

when i look for something to photograph i usually try to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. things that you walk by every day and don't notice but when you actually stop and look at it you find that it is something special, something unique.

this picture was one of those instances but not one that i would have normally seen as an opportunity. i don't usually go for the creepy when it comes to subjects but i had to take advantage of this scene.

just about every day as i walked home from campus i would pass this sign:



i remember thinking just how creepy it was - rusted metal, creepy hand-painted lettering, and especially the "...." at the end. i think if they had had a little more room at the end they would have added "or else!" to top it off, the trees were cold and bare.

for my part to add to the creepiness i knew the picture had to be taken with my holga - out of focus and dark corners, lo-fi reproduction, and a low angle to get that creepy sign looming above the viewer - everything came together nicely on this one to make one creepy image.

all content, no context

i find that some of my favorite pictures are those of subjects that don't have a pre-formulated meaning in my mind (or others' minds for that matter). they are subjects that when i see them i just think "this is a nice scene, i think i'll try to capture what i'm feeling here". the spontaneity of photographing like this can be exhilarating.



this is looking south from battery park - the southern tip of manhattan. at first i considered framing this picture with the statue of liberty in the background but then decided against it.

if i had done that it would have become a picture of the statue of liberty with a boat in the foreground and once you looked at it you would have labeled it a picture of the statue of liberty and that would have brought up thoughts of what pictures of the statue of liberty should be. by excluding it you are forced to make your own conclusions about what the picture is saying.

here's another example.



this is in the harvard square station of the boston subway. the picture was taken with my holga camera set on the ground with my keys under the lens to point it up slightly.

there's nothing in the picture that says boston or harvard or even subway. it's just a set of stairs and a couple of escalators in some type of concrete structure. without any context you have to look at the content to appreciate the picture - the strong lines, the blurred people moving on the escalators - all the action swirling around the empty stairs.

you're free to see what you see without any preconceived notions about the subject.

new arrivals in the holga family

i've got some new arrivals in the holga gallery! - san francisco, manhattan, brooklyn, and washington dc. here are a few of them...

once again, the brooklyn bridge:



honestly, can anyone walk over this bridge with camera in hand and not take a few shots? it's such a great location - kind of a photo-cliché but that's ok, right?



love the flatiron building... and the raindrop-covered chair.

i modified my holga so it can focus as close as two feet. it really emphasizes what's in the center of the picture and get you some extra vignetting. the picture above was taken like so.



this is one of my favorite new additions. it just seemed to work out nicely straight from the scan. it's kind of a visual contradiction - everyone is there at the lincoln memorial but no one is looking at him. in fact, they've all got their backs to him. it makes you question the situation.

photographs from holgas have a distinctive style, i.e. lo-fi, (usually) square, optically inferior, etc., etc. it really seems to work well with certain subjects (for me, architecture).

so what scene or location would you want to see in holga form? is there something you feel would fit particularly well into this category? what do you think?

a healthy dose of holga

for some reason i feel that the holga lends itself well to architectural photography. maybe it's just my own preference, maybe it's because the holga's plastic lens cuts out sharpness and detail and reduces objects down to forms, maybe it's the square format, who knows. whatever it is there's something unique about the way it captures architecture.

here's a dose of holga architecture photographs...


this is the foot bridge leading to the wells fargo building in salt lake city with one utah center in background. if you've ever seen this building and/or bridge at night it's pretty exciting - it glows this great shade of neon blue - it's not harsh, it's just nice and cool. i tried this same shot at night with the lights on but it just didn't work. the color detracted from the forms of the bridge.


the utah commercial and savings bank building was built in 1888 and has since been squished between the two newer buildings on either side. it makes me feel kind of sorry for it - hang in there little buddy!


looking back at the parking levels of the portland international airport i noticed the soaring framework above - i had to take the picture. i thought it was fitting for an airport to have such a lofty structure.


the southeast tower of the salt lake temple - nice day downtown at a wedding...

he-man, army guys, and ducklings

one of the great things about the holga is that its lens suffers from a bad case of astigmatism (among other optical "defects"). this means that the further away the object is from the center of the image (towards the edges of the frame), the more out of focus it will be in the picture. although most people would find this to be a problem, it actually adds to the aesthetic of the pictures it takes.

one way to take advantage of this feature is to center the subject in the picture. this isolates the subject and makes it stand out more in the picture.

here's fisto from masters of the universe hanging from my rear view mirror with some onlooking army men.

and here are jack, kack, lack, mack, nack, ouack, pack, and quack following their mom, mrs. mallard, on their way to the boston public garden.

the holga

"Did you think your eyes were open?"

"I'm afraid to say that until this very moment they have been closed. The unassuming Holga is here to save you from a future of digital pixels and images shared on small screens on cameras or phones. We have all become numbed with photography, there is no denying it, but a chunky camera made almost entirely of plastic has been put on this Earth to save us. It will reawaken your vision, fill you with joy, make you see beauty when you thought it had disappeared forever, and bring out sunshine on a cloudy day."

- www.lomography.com/holga/

the holga is a cheap, plastic medium format camera (it uses film that is about 2 1/4" wide) - and it only costs about 30 bones.

the beauty of this camera is that it really makes you rethink the way you take photographs. the process is as follows: after estimating the focus of the camera, choosing one of the two aperture options, pointing it in the direction of the subject (the squinty viewfinder is only somewhat effective in framing the shot), and tripping the single-speed shutter you hope that the picture turns out alright. in the end you will be amazed by what this camera can accomplish given it's extremely rudimentary design.

i took the following photographs with my holga when we lived in cambridge massachusetts last summer.

central square, cambridge massachusetts

harvard square t station