Stroll On State is a fairly new tradition that kicks off the holiday season for the city of Rockford,IL. It started a few years back and has been quite successful. Funny thing is, I have never attended myself. That changed this year. My health is good, my twins are older, and my wife and I wanted to check it out. You know, have a family day.
After the decision was made to go, I knew from the get go I didn’t want to over complicate things with heavy cameras or a bag of cameras. My focus was the experience with my family. I knew I could still document our time and enjoy it all. So the decision was easy in regards to what camera I would take. The Holga 120 GCFN. Yup, that’s right.
2021 is the year for me to shoot the bell out of my Holga cameras. Easy to carry, fun to shoot, and no stress on “perfection.” So it was easy. I was gifted some expired TMax 400 so I figured I would use that up. (Although I feel that HP5 and the Holga are magical lol).
We got the twins dressed up and headed out the door. It was a beautiful day and we found parking downtown near the parade. We were good to go. As far as our experience as first timers, we all had a blast. The parade was fun, the twins got a lot of candy, we had s’mores, and they got to write a letter to Santa. We did miss the tree lighting but they were ready to go. Overall, great day and I feel I chose the right camera to document it.
Back to the Holga….I kind of knew what to expect due to my experience shooting it. I ended up taking three rolls of film and I looking back, it was plenty. I snapped away AND for the first time, I even used the flash. I’m not s flash kind of guy but I definitely will be using it more for indoor snapshots. I ended up developing all three rolls in Kodak’s HC-110 Dil B. The rolls came out fine and they scanned well. So yea, our first experience at Stroll On State was the perfect way to kick off the holiday season and we definitely will be going back next year. Anyways…attached are some of the photos. Enjoy!
