Holga Landscapes of Amwell Nature Reserve

Amwell Nature Reserve is a former gravel pit near the village of Ware in Hertfordshire. It forms part of the larger Lee Valley Regional Park. My personal project is to photograph the Regional Park and other nature reserves in and around the Hertfordshire town of Broxbourne using a variety of different format cameras to produce a documentary record of this lovely area which stretches for 26 miles along the banks of the River Lea.

You can find many more photos of the Lea Valley and Broxbourne here on my site.

These two images were taken with my Holga which was loaded with Kodak Portra 400NC. I have recently bought the Holga Wide Angle and Tele lenses and this was my first chance to test them out. The first shot below is taken using the Holga's usual lens.

The photo looks like an old landscape painting - I had to fiddle around with the colour balance abit to get rid of a strong magenta cast on the scanned file and so the shot ended up with quite a warm feel to it.

The second image was taken from exactly the same position, with the same film but this time with the tele lens - I wanted to see if I could get a bigger image of the cows in the field.

There's not a huge amount of magnification but the vignetting is more exaggerated. When you fit the Tele lens you need to ensure the lens is focused to infinity (which it was here). When I studied the file at 100% size in Photoshop it was not as sharp as the first image, but the vignetting does give the photo a nice effect and I'm not sure which I like best.

You can see the full gallery of Holga Landscapes by clicking on the link