Holga photo of a dog (Chocolate Labrador Retriever) This photo of my dog, Sassy, was an experiment in using a Holga plastic camera and an off camera flash (Strobist style). The flash is camera upper right and is shot through a white umbrella and there is a silver reflector camera left to bounce some light back. I was using a Holga 120N which has a hot shoe and the flash was triggered remotely using an Elinchrom Universal Skyport radio trigger. The film stock was Fomapan 100.

What you see here is a crop of the actual negative. I compensated for the viewfinder alignment by composing the dog slightly to the left in the frame but the field of view was just too large and I got a lot more of the surroundings in the photo than I had intended.

Also noticeable is that I am off with the focus. Yes, I know the Holga is supposed to be soft but next time I think I will measure the distance and focus appropriately.

I developed the Fomapan in Kodak HC-110 dilution H. Unfortunately, my negatives were extremely dusty. What you see here has been cleaned up in Lightroom but the dust is baked into the emulsion so next time I will need to do more for dust control. I don't normally have this problem so I wonder is there something especially soft about the Fomapan emulsion.

Scanning the negatives was not straight forward this time. Because the images are very low key, I couldn't use the auto-everything exposure mode and had to tweak each scan manually.

Overall, the experiment was an interesting one. I'll post a few more images from the shoot once I get time to play with the negatives. Next time, I'd like to try the Holga off camera flash with a human subject but the people I know are not as easy to bribe with treats than Sassy is.

By the way, you can see the digital test shots that I took to check the light here .