The past decade’s explosion of digital cameras—or even our ubiquitous phonecams—have lured many new folks into pursuing photography. It can certainly shorten the learning curve when you’re free to shoot many different versions of a scene, or try crazy experiments, all for free and with immediate feedback. So for an increasing fraction of today’s photographers, film cameras are just a hazy memory.
Yet there is still a powerful draw to recapture some of the “analog soul” of chemical photography. You can see this in the surprise popularity of the Hipstamatic iPhone app, the success of Lomography-branded cameras at retailers like Urban Outfitters, and the recent re-launch of Polaroid-compatible film by The Impossible Project.
For those who want to dip a toe into shooting the real thing, there is much to recommend a basic Holga 120N camera. It’s cheap, widely available, and gives images with a distinctive dreamy flavor. And in general, any camera with the same large film format will give a noticeably different feeling from digital (something I’ve written about before).
We’re talking about shooting the 120 film size, often referred to as medium format.
Even if you’re an old hand with 35mm film, 120 has some quirks which can trip you up. So today I’ll give a visual step-by-step on how to load it, and how frame-counting works with 120 cameras.
Tech support for film photography: DIY projects, notes on vintage cameras, and random eccentric opinion.