Couples Photoshoot on Holga 120 film camera - Salt Lake City, Utah - Poise & Ivy Imagery
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If you’re new here, Hi, hello! My name is Ivy, I’m a wedding and couples photographer based in northern Utah, in the Salt Lake City area. I love to capture all kinds of stories and making sure that I help your uniqueness shine through my lens is my specialty.
I’ve recently been feeling more and more pulled into film photography, and as everyone knows, a Holga is a film girlie’s STAPLE camera for getting really interesting and surprising images from any shoot! I’ve been shooting film ever since 2020, but I finally decided to include it as a part of my business. I now offer film photoshoots and film additions to wedding day coverage. I’m so excited about this because film as a medium is such an art and such a beautiful process. I’m excited to continue to explore what film photography means for and to my couples, and share how it helps me slow down and show up during photoshoots more, helping me be more intentional in my practice and delivering a more meaningful product to my clients.
Let’s dive into this shoot!
I decided to load my Holga with black and white film with a few creative points in mind;
The vibe I’m going for is very “countryside windy.” I’m not sure if this is going to make sense to anybody but me, but I wanted to capture more of the movement and the moment rather than the color. As an AVID colorist, this was an exercise in contrast and composition for sure! I loved moving my focus from color composition back to the basics of subject composition.
I styled my couple in high contrast outfits on purpose. I wanted to really add to the depth of the image, and with film there’s only so much I want to do in post in order to preserve the integrity of the medium. I’m not trying to drastically alter a scan in post processing, so I was much more intentional in planning this shoot than I am with shoots that I know I’ll be editing drastically in post (like removing distractions or using masking tools).
I chose a location that was very open and had little to no distractions from my subject (my couple). I like shooting at this location every now and again, but I KNEW I wanted to be here for this shoot. In a black and white image, I don’t want too many mid-tones pulling near 50% grey and diluting the contrast of my image. I love having very distinct light values (as in, highlights, shadows, mid-tones), and so I planned the outfits and location together to create a set that provided a lot of natural contrast. With that part of the work out of the way, I had more freedom to shoot many different frame compositions without having to consider whether or not I had too much “middle value light” (is that a term?) in my exposure.
In total from this photoshoot, I delivered 15 film photos from my Holga.
When using a holga 120n you can chose to either shoot with a 6×6 ratio or a 6×4.5 ratio. I wanted to shoot with the most exposures available to me, so I decided to forgo the nostalgia of a square image for the efficiency of a rectangular exposure. Not every photo was a clear winner, but I still love them all!
Holgas are known for often having light leaks and surprising scans, so there are some scans that I didn’t end up sending to my client. However, that’s part of the art, and part of the draw! When you shoot with a Holga, you know what you’re signing up for. These aren’t the images that are going to have perfect bokeh and clean, crisp focus. These are made for the moment with minimal attention to detail.
And that’s actually true, it’s not just my opinion!
The Holga camera was created in 1981/2 by Lee Ting-mo as an affordable medium format film camera option for Chinese families. The original 120 Holgas (and the one I have) are entirely plastic, so they cost much much less to produce than traditional cameras. 120 was popular at the time in China, but a shift to 35mm format film was becoming more and more popular. This, and the light leaks and vignetting the camera produced, immediately made it an unpopular contender in its target market. With that, the market shifted to the west, and it is now a cult classic, sought after specifically for it’s low-tech and unconventional artistry.
I prefer very little to no vignetting, so I painted the interior of my Holga matte black to minimize reflective light leaks and taped the seams with black gaffer tape to prevent light differences. I still had no clue how these images were going to turn out, but I wanted to ensure I had the most control possible over my image. It’s all part of the process, and part of the artists (my) creative direction.
Kodak pro 400tX film, matte black paint to lessen in-camera light reflections, and gaffer tape to tape up all the corners and seams of the camera
Holga backing panel before the paint! It’s a little bit reflective, so I wanted to minimize light reflections with the matte paint.
Holga backing panel post paint. It’s a little better, and although I have no idea if it helped or if it was a waste of time, I suggest this anyway just to be safe.
Every single shot from this shoot met my highest expectations. My inspo wasl “chilly irish countryside springtime” and omg everything was so perfect. Not only did I have the pleasure to work with such a stunning couple, but they were so receptive to the vision and to the prompts I gave them while setting up each shot.
Many of these photos are now all time favorites and will earn a space on my office wall with other of my printed works. Not because they’re particularly unique from other work I’ve created, but because they really are just that beautiful AND there was so much intention in creating this photoshoot, and seeing it all come about just the way I envisioned was such a rewarding experience.
I decided to include my other two cameras on this shoot as well, so I also shot on my Nikon F100 35mm film camera with a 50mm 1.8 Nikkor lens, and my Sony A7III with a 35mm 1.4 Sony lens. Here are those shots, back to back with each other. This photoshoot became more than a study in 120 black and white film thanks to these two cameras. I have the pleasure to compare almost shot for shot my digital photography style with my film photography.
At this point I ran out of 35 mm film but I was still shooting digital side by side with my Holga on 120 mm film. Here are those shots on digital from the section at the fence as seen in the black and white medium (120mm) format above.
Anna and Javi are SUPER cool and I appreciate their willingness to be cool in front of the camera for me. Shooting on film really forced me to slow down during my shoot, and as I was providing prompts and poses to my models, I found that the slowness of my actual shutter speed, as in, I was taking maybe a shot on each camera per minute rather than one every second, allowed my couple to feel more natural in each pose rather than just moving from one pose to the next and never being able to relax into the shoot.
If you’ve been interested in medium format film, I definitely recommend starting out with a Holga and getting a feel for the format before investing in a heavier duty traditional medium format camera.
If you’d like to have a photoshoot with me on either film or digital, let’s tell your story <3 Reach out to me below to start chatting about your photoshoot or wedding coverage!
All the love
Ivy
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