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Sunflower. Movement through Holga micro-clicks.

Welcome to Wonderland : Microclicks

I was inspired to try the Microclick technique after seeing some examples in the Holga groups on Flickr. It appealed to me because as I'd already experimented with things like multiple exposures, and hacking toy cameras to give more painterly, dreamy images. It's one of those techniqies that's a bit easier to do than it is to explain - basically it's taking multiple exposures of the same subject, but offsetting the exposures whilst rotating or panning the camera (always left to right). There are guides on squarefrog (www.squarefrog.co.uk/techniques/microclicks.html) so I won't repeat all their tips here. As a starrting point I try and overlap about a third of the viewfinder view between shots, and click on 4 times. That's my basic technique, but then I sometimes vary the amount of overlap, and the number of clicks. The easiest camera to use is a Holga 120 (medium format). This is because the winding on mechanism and the shutter are not linked, so you can fire the shutter as many times as you like, and wind on as much as you like between shots. Also the simplest Holga is about the cheapest toy camera you can buy. Other options are the Diana / Diana mini, Sprocket Rocket and the new Belair camera, all by Lomography (not tried any of those myself) You can use any film you like - so far I've shot colour neg, cross-processed slide film and redscaled film. There are some fantastic black-and-white images online, though I've not tried it yet. The one thing you need to bear in mind is that you are building up 3 or 4 exposures on any one bit of your film, so it's easy to overexpose your image. Therefore it's best NOT to shoot in bright sunlight - my Olympic stadium Microclick was shot at dusk, after it had just got too dark to shoot normally with a Holga. It's also really handy to use redscale film as it's much harder to overexpose that than regular film, and the dreamy painterly results seem to work really nicely with that film. I think you can roll your own medium format redscale but it's trickier than making 35mm, so it's easiest to buy the Lomography Redscale 120 film - I prefer the XR over the normal Redscale 100 - more subtle colours, less firey reds. The biggest problem with shooting microclicks is getting your films scanned - as the finished image is around 2 to 3 times wider than normal 6x6 medium format frame. A lot of photo labs will struggle to scan them - I'm lucky to have a friendly lab in London that is used to doing them - they scan them in ovelapping passes then I stick them back together in Photoshop. But I know most people end up scanning them on their own flatbed scanners. My best advice is not to get too bogged down in the technique (I can remember stressing about how many degrees to rotate the camera) and just to shoot a test roll - just make a note of how many clicks you wound on on each attempt. It's all a bit hit-and-miss, but when it works it can produce really interesting results.

-James Butler

CGSF: Thanks for sharing James! Guys and girls, you can click here to check out the sample shots above in higher resolution. James has tons of amazing pictures on his stream, especially his double exposures, so make sure to check out his Flickr.