The Night Time Is The Right Time To Be With Your Holga 120N!

Taking timed exposures with the bulb feature at night with the Holga 120N can be lots of fun!

I have been taking night shots, or timed exposures, for some 20+ years now and only recently have been experimenting with my Holga 120N camera. There was an epiphany one night – as an experiment I decided to shoot some long exposures using Kodak Ektar 100ASA color negative film and was quite surprised with the results. In the old days of analog film to get stunning, color accurate shots at night you had to use a Tungsten Slide film like Kodak 64T. The shot of the “Blue Ferris Wheel” was taken on that film. The other shots were all taken with the Ektar 100. Take a look at these shots for a second…

Ordinarily, when shooting a daylight balanced film stock for long exposures, (the average one here is 32 seconds in length,) you would get some pretty bad results. Most of the time there would be a dingy, putrid yellow color cast to the shot, YUCK! But not with these puppies, so what happened? Well, I scanned these negatives on a flatbed scanner with a “live” lid – one that has a lightsource in the lid for scanning negs and slides. All I did was set the scan to “Auto Color Correct” and, VIOLA! The perfect colors were rendered! Not only did it remove the necessity of using the more expensive Tungsten film for night shots but it freed my photography up to where I can use the same film, day or night! I have gotten similar results with other color negative film stock but the Ektar 100 is still the best!

I hope this post has been helpful and check out more info on a class I am giving at: www.belaircamera.com classes.

written by grizzbar on 2010-12-14 #gear #tutorials #night #film #negative #analogue #tungsten #tipster #64t #lomography #kodak #holga #ektar100 #timed #grizzbar