Holga 120WPC Wide Angle Pinhole: First Impressions

April 20, 2009

I love panoramic photography but I’m unable to afford a “decent” camera. My previous review of the Horizon Perfekt covered a highly functional but still lomotastic 35mm panoramic camera.  Despite its odd optical characteristics (due to the rotating lens) I’ve been generally very happy with the camera and am saving up for a film holder so I can scan my perfekt images using my Nikon 8000 (which has a segmented 35mm film holder).

I became aware of the Holga 120WPC camera through a Freestyle Photo flyer.  I’ve never done any pinhole photography and for $50 it undercut the Zero Image line of beautiful pinhole cameras by at least $150 so the cost of entering the field seemed very reasonable.  This review will cover the physical build of the holga and provide some background information on what’s needed to get up and running with pinhole photography.  As this was my first run with pinholes I’ll walk you through the steps needed to turn out a successful roll of negatives for yourself.

The Holga 120 WPC wide angle pinhole is a fairly new product from the holga family.  It has the same no-frills design strategy and plastic less-than-fantastic build quality.   The camera will be immediately familiar to anyone who has owned a holga previously.

The 120 WPC uses the same locking mechanism as the normal 120 holga to hold the back on.  You have two sliding thin metal brackets on either end of the camera with holes for a neck strap.  I don’t see the value of a neck strap as you will be using this camera on a tripod unless you fancy wasting a lot of film.  Opening up the back reveals the familiar holga interior.  The 120 WPC comes with two masks, a 6×12 and a 6×9 mask.  I don’t believe that its designed to be used without one of the two masks installed so if you’re familiar with the 120 holga and always pop out the mask to get 6×6 format, don’t do so. Decide which format you want to shoot in (I selected 6×9 as I don’t believe my scanner can handle 6×12)

The back has the red tinted window with two settings, 16 and 12.  This allows you to wind your film to either the 6×12 or 6×9 settings.  One very important tip is that you should only shoot ODD FRAME NUMBERS.   Setting the window slider to 16 will give you the 6×4.5 numbers so you’ll shoot odds and get 6×9 format.  Setting the window slider to 12 will give you the 6×6 numbers so you’ll shoot odds and get 6×12 format.  I mention this as I was a dummy and didn’t think about this until I was halfway through my first roll.  That was $3.00 down the drain.

The winder is not designed to keep the film taut and the roll wiggles on both the source and takeup rolls as there’s only a peg on the top for both sides to keep it in place.  If you wanted film flatness you should have invested in a more expensive camera.   The Zero Image cameras are advertised as using a spring back to ensure flatness.  Again, if you’ve used a holga before, you’ll know how this works.

The shutter can be tripped in two ways.  First, there’s a button which slides the entire shutter assembly over to open up the pinhole.  Pushing the button with your finger is not suggested as with long exposure times you’ll shake the camera badly as its spring loaded and requires a firm touch and for you to hold it open.  The shutter does have a metal threaded socket for a cable release.  I was expecting a plastic socket so seeing metal here for greater durability was a nice touch.   Once you get the cable release in there its just a simple matter of pressing on the cable and holding for your desired exposure.

That’s really all there is to the camera.  So let’s talk about what you need to make pinhole exposures. The only real challenge to pinholes once you have a camera is determining exposure.

1. Find the correct exposure for your f-stop
2. Correct for reciprocity failure.

Pinholes are literally pinholes so they have a small f-stop.  In the case of the Holga 120WPC you’re dealing with f/135.

The problem is that most light meters don’t handle up to f/135.   The easiest way to determine your exposure is to simply use a chart that relates a smaller f-stop value to the one for your camera.  There are a number of online charts such as the one at Mr. Pinhole which will give you a table of related exposures.  For example a 1/30 of a second exposure at f/16 which is well within the range of all light meters corresponds to a 2 second exposure at f/135.  There is a rather well done program for windows called Pinhole Designer which provides you with a chart that you can export out to excel.

As you can see most pinhole exposures will be very long, even in bright sunlight.  If we need to think about long exposures we need to think about reciprocity failure.

Reciprocity failure is a characteristic of film.  Generally film is designed to respond to exposures between about 1/2000 of a second and about a second.   For exposures of longer than a minute the film get “lazy” and extra extra exposure is required to make up for the lassitude of the film.  In more technical terms, film works by exposing silver hallide compounds to photos of light.  You need a certain amount of energy to cause the change in the hallide that will result in an image on the film.  If you have a very dim light hitting the film there’s not enough energy being transmitted to the film in order to affect that change.  The only way to direct more energy onto the film is to increase the amount of time that light is allowed to pour through the small opening.

Manufacturers typically provide sheets for reciprocity failure of their films.  You’ll have to take the base exposure for your specific f-stop and either apply a formula or use the manufacturer’s chart to add additional time to your exposure.  In the case of older emulsions such as Tri-X this can be a considerable amount of time.   Newer emulsions such as Fuji Acros claim to follow normal exposures up to 120 seconds and only a half stop additional exposure up to 1000 seconds.  According to some tests the Fuji Acros emulsion does live up to its claim.

You will need to do your own tests and consult the manufactuer (or google) to build your own exposure charts.

Once you have your exposure charts drawn up its time to grab your tripod and head out into the field for some shooting.  I’ll pick up on my own experience shooting my first two rolls in another post.

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