© 2012 Stacie Turner. All rights reserved.

Holga Evolution

Posted on April 27, 2012 by in Holga, We Are Such Stuff | 4 Comments

When I shoot portraits I tend to work organically. I don’t have a shot list, I don’t try to control all that much. I take the child to a location with attractive light and a pleasing background and get to work. This should be utterly anxiety inducing and yet as this method of working naturally has worked out repeatedly over the past several years I am able to relax into it and trust the images will come. However, with the holga work I am a thinker. I like to plan. I become unable to shoot a decent image without a plan. Yet, I’m finding, just as with portraits, my best images are the oddly half planned ones, not the ones I intended to take.

Let me explain.

I saw sparkly rabbit Easter masks at Target in the $1 bins. They had a really compelling combination of creepy/cute going on and into the cart they went. I planned on putting both children in masks and standing them in front of one of the sets of doors at the church to get an Easter picture that combined the bunny motif with the religious motif in, I hoped, the same uncomfortable and peculiar balance they have in life.

Didn’t work.

It was too busy. The competing elements of the door hardware and the stones overwhelmed the masks, and some of the door hardware took that “don’t stab people in the head people with horizons” compositional rule and made it an almost comical example of, no, really, don’t do that.

Stacie Turner, a portrait photographer in Connecticut and New England, created a seried of Easter Mask holga portraits.

I took a roll there. Some close ups. Some further away. I was going to get the perfect door hardware stabbing you through the head shot, I guess.

We started walking home. I paused in front of a white brick wall and asked the kids if they would do a couple more shots. They agreed and I ended up with some I really loved.

Connecticut photographer Stacie Turner makes fine art holga portraits of children

holga portraits by Connecticut children's photographer Stacie Turner who works out of West Hartford as a West Hartford portrait photographer

But wait, I also asked one child to pose in front of a random door in a wall. Except I mangled the shot and had the bulb/normal switch in the wrong place.

connecticut art photographer Stacie Turner uses holga toy cameras to create images of childhood

So I went back another day and shot it again, this time actually in focus. Yay, right? Except they aren’t as good. The image becomes weird and intangible when it’s slightly out of focus. In focus it’s just a kid in a mask by a door.

Stacie Turner creates dreamy images with her holga that tickle the imagination as a connecticut children's photographer and fine art photographer in connecticut working with toy cameras.

So… out of focus it is then.

4 Responses to "Holga Evolution"

  1. Chris Huestis
    - April 27, 2012 at 6:58 am

    I’ve always loved your photography, especially the altered realities of your Holga work. Most photographers don’t take portraits; they replicate someone’s image on a light-sensitive medium. Portraits offer the viewer more insight into the subject, even if it’s all make-believe. Your portraits, for me, are art. Art may start with a plan, but it ultimately morphs into something else, directed there by fate and the vision and whimsy of the artist. Keep up with the half-plans. They just work.

  2. jennyo
    - April 27, 2012 at 12:28 pm

    The out of focus shot is perfect. Thank you for talking through how you got it.

  3. mrklauskinsky
    - April 29, 2012 at 5:54 am

    the blur gives the pic another dimension of interpretation! :) great pictures!!

  4. Lisa Howeler
    - May 3, 2012 at 7:46 am

    Very cool shots. I picked up some cool masks after Halloween…the one was like a masquerade mask…never did get any shots with it…should have grabbed my nieces for a shoot :-)