Holga 35mm stream of consciousness Venice Beach film roll

 Hey all,

Sorry for the long absence, but I've been in the midst of a huge de-cluttering project here, which has involved going through long-forgotten boxes and stuff, looking for items to be kept or tossed. One such box contained a number of experimental plastic camera works of mine from several years back, including a long form stream of consciousness imagery at the skate park in Venice Beach, circa 2008 or so. It was created by putting 35mm slide film inside a Holga 120 medium format camera, so that the entire area of the film was exposed, including the sprocket holes.

Due to the inherent imperfections found in the Holga--one of the reasons why plastic cameras can be such a joy--the resulting images often overlap, are sometimes blurred, and contain a weird mixture of immediacy and surrealism. In addition, I'm pretty sure that the film used at the time was past its expiration date, which can introduce interesting color and hue shifts under certain circumstances. I honestly don't remember much about the actual shoot, as this was just one of many that I was doing with plastic cameras at the time. (This was made largely possible thanks to my employment at Freestyle Photographic Supplies, where I was able to snag considerable discounts on film and processing.) There are many, many more examples of experimental works such as this one in my archives, including some long-lost Holga Stereo images to complement my already prodigious collection of 3-D photographs.

The entire piece runs nearly the entire length of a standard roll of 35mm film, 36 exposures. It is in fact so long that it can't be properly displayed here on this blog--it would look like a long line from a very long way away. Therefore, I've chopped it into smaller segments here so that you can more easily see just what I managed to capture all those years ago. 

Please note that this project was made possible by assembling several images shot with my Nikon Z9 over a light box, as I presently have no access to a scanner that will scan all the way to the sprocket holes, and especially not over such a long distance of film. Since the light box is an old one with florescent lighting, the exposures were not all uniform in color. so there are a couple of obvious joins that are not on the original film.

I will be investigating shortly if a full size ultra-ultra-ultra wide print can be made of this, preferably from the original film. It would probably be in the area of 30 feet long or so. We shall see.