Thanks everyone for your kind words
I have been wanting to run some IR through the Holga for a while now... been getting mixed reviews on which film to try. Pretty much settled on the Efke though, and this might just be a enough of a push that I need... thanks!
FWIW I have tried every IR film on the market in a Holga. Kodak's HIE, Ilford's SFX, Rollei's 400 IR, and the Efke IR820. Sadly Kodak has dropped HIE from production and even then they did not make a medium format version. The Ilford and Rollei films are more of an extended red film than a true IR film and have very poor IR sensitivity while the Efke fim has very good sensitivity down to around 820nm. Even if HIE was available in medium format I would still use the Efke film over HIE as I think it has better tonality. While IR light does not have "colors" the world looks very different in IR light from 720-820nm than it does from 820-900nm. Kodak's HIE records that deeper world while Efke's IR820 does not. That plus the fact that IR820 is based on R100 which is the old Adox KB21/R21 recipe means that it is very rich in silver so it has great midrange tonalities. Of course that also means it is slow (I rate it at 1.5-3iso with a Hoya R72)
There is also a lot of bad information floating around the net about IR films in general. The biggest one is that black plastic is not opaque to IR films. Even with HIE this is just not an issue with either my Holgas or my black plastic daylight tanks. I have had no issues with fogging even when they were out all day in full mid-summer sun.
i can't help but wonder, though if yer wasting money on IR in the snow....would they have looked any different with regular 120? IR is like 3x as expensive!
True it does cost more and at $9.99 a roll from Freestyle it aint cheap. However there is a difference with using it over regular panchromatic B&W film like Tri-X or HP5. It is hard to describe but the main differences are the expanded midtones, and the blackness to the water. These are subtle differences for sure and I don't shoot a lot of IR in the snow but it is fun to experiment a bit, mainly just to do it.
