the last f/stop

I received an unsolicited DM on discord from one of my keyboard friends asking for my shipping address. We are running a gift exchange but he said he wasn't my secret santa so I was curious what was up... Intrigued I shared my info and started waiting for the surprise, and what a wonderful surprise it was! A Holga and a few rolls of film!  I used to have one back in the day but didn't end up keeping it since it was tough for me to scan 120 film but now that I'm all set up for it I'm excited to use it.  I went out to a park by the lake where I went in my "Mamiya m645: new (to me)" post, with the colors changing here finally, hoping to grab some nice tones oh the 645 and give the Holga a run.  Shockingly - not really - the m645 had winding issues yet again, causing some frame overlapping but the Holga performed admirably in b/w.  The Holga has a 6x4.5 mask too so I guess with the latest issue with the m645 body from KEH, I will just be happy to have a working me...

South West of Dallas is the Cedar Ridge Preserve, a very large nature park with several great wooded trails, streams, overlooks, and a lake. I have a vision to spend more time doing scenic shots this winter when the street shooting is pretty much non existent, so I went down to shoot over the weekend. I brought my Mamiya m645 and the Bessa R with Ektar 100 in the 645 with some Arista 400 in backup, and some orthochromatic film I picked up at a swapmeet (I should probably write another blog post about that). I normally dislike photographing in wooded areas. I find that because they're so well shaded, the scenes are often very low dynamic range and I find it hard to compose interesting shots. Sadly, this outing was no exception. I really had high hopes for the scenic lookouts, which did yield a bit of interest but because the day turned out to be mostly overcast, there was a lack of punch I was really hoping for.    The first few frames on the m645 were lackluster as expected, b...