Photographing An Iconic Location – A One Shot Story

My first camera, a birthday gift from my parents, was a Kodak Brownie Fiesta. All plastic, a simple viewfinder, and it used 127 film. Keep the sun over your shoulder, the Kodak film instruction sheet advised, and you would be fine. No one was fussing over bokeh with those simple cameras.

So, using a Holga brought back a lot of memories, if not exactly muscle memory.  The question was what to use the camera for? I live in Honolulu, Hawaii, so I decided to break mine in with shots of Diamond Head, the volcano crater that is the backdrop for Waikiki.

Truly bringing back the Brownie Fiesta experience would have required me loading the Holga with Kodak Verichrome Pan. But since it’s been at least 50 years since I bought that emulsion, I went with Kodak Tri-X.

I’ve been working on a “36 Views of Diamond Head” project off and on for a number of years. The Holga offered a nice change of pace from the usual Rolleiflex and Mamiya medium format cameras I’ve used for that project.

I decided to shoot from a public park called Magic Island, which for TV show geeks is better known as the location where some of the opening sequences for the 1960s TV comedy Gilligan’s Island was filmed.  As I walked across the park, I saw the coconut palms and knew I had my shot.

The Holga focusing system allows you to select from four zones – single guy close by, a couple, a family, and a mountain. I chose the mountain. My Holga (the 120GN model) also has  a crude aperture control (F8 or a bit more light), but you don’t shoot with a Holga to fuss with F stops.

The result was the photo that illustrates this feature, which I liked a lot.  Ironically, I went back to the same spot about a week later to recreate the shot with my Rolleiflex 2.8F. Also using Tri-X. I liked the Holga version better. Go figure

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