My little boy Lucas just loves trains, no doubt thanks to Thomas and Friends on ABC.  So one day back in March 2008, just before his first birthday, I took him for a ride in the car on a mission to find a train for him to look at.  

Eventually I found a train parked on the side of the highway, just near the Hobart Cenotaph and the Gasworks Village.  I believe it is a place where they park the train to prepare it for its next trip, and to turn it around.  We were checking out the train and then the train driver came down to say hello, and gladly held Lucas for the photo.

This photo is taken with a Holga 120 CFN, on cheap Kodak 35mm film from the supermarket.  My wife Melissa bought me the Holga for Christmas.  If you dont know what a Hogla is, read on.

It is basically a toy plastic camera, that has come into vogue around the world of late, probably because there has been such a push for image quality, great lenses, and increasingly fancy digital cameras, and sometimes its nice to go back to the absolute basics.

The Holga features a plastic fixed focal length lens, which you can manually focus, though the distance guides on the lens are questionable and there is no through-the-lens focus, as the viewfinder is seperate.  You have to manually wind the film, and I dont mean one flick of a lever and you have your next frame… you have to turn the knob and count the clicks so you know you have turned it far enough.  There is a flash (mine also has three different coloured gels built in, but no hotshoe sadly) and two aperture settings, which actually appear to be the same anyhow!

The Holga takes medium format 120 film, though I have an adaptor that lets you put a roll of 35mm in, which is a whole lot easier and cheaper.  The downside is that you end out with a cropped image (APS-C dSLR sensor style!) which makes framing your shot harder, and you dont get the vignette effect that you do when using the 120.  I plan to run some 120 Velvia through it soon.

I have a few photos to put up on the blog, and I can do it now I finally got a scanner  Thanks go to the girl at the lab who developed this roll of film, who thought she might save some negative slips and roll them up and put them back in the canister, so they curled, and got scratched.  And dusty.  Joy.

This image was scanned and imported into Lightroom 2, vignette added and some colour correction and contrast boost done as well.  I am in two minds about doing the colour correction as it takes away some of the characteristics of the film.  I guess if it was decent film I would have left it alone.