My First Holga Image

Thursday 07/12/2007 2:28 PM

A Holga is a cheap, plastic, medium format camera that was originally made in Hong Kong in the early 80's. In the 25 or so years since, it has been discovered as a wholly lo-fi, unreliable picture taker revered for both its unpredictability and unique photographs.

Basically, it's a camera that takes bad pictures, but "bad" is a relative term. You know how stuff that once was cheesy is now cool and retro? Same type of thing.

I just picked up my first developed roll of Holga photos, and I'm impressed that the quality is as good as is. Out of the twelve shots, I only got about nine that have any image at all, but that's OK because I'm in experimentation mode right now.

The image posted with this text is probably the best shot on the roll. I tweaked it a little bit in Photoshop, but the dark corners (they call it vignetting and it is actually a desired effect) and saturated (i.e., bright) colors are all vintage Holga.

Your Link of the Day is to the Lomography web site, which is Ground Zero for the lo-fidelity, grunge photography movement. It all started with a cheap, Russian 35mm camera called the Lomo LC-A, but the movement has grown to include other cameras of unreliable quality.

Couple interesting things about my Holga:

It's the first camera I've bought that comes with a roll of electrical tape. It used to be required for holding the batteries in, but my model doesn't require that. The tape is also provided so you can run it along the seams of the plastic camera housing to keep light from leaking in. Because I haven't taped mine yet, you can tell from looking at the picture of Argus that my camera seems to be pretty light-tight. Bummer.
The Holga is a medium format camera, which means the film has about four times the surface area of a 35mm film frame. This means your images are higher quality due to the film size (but that is counter-balanced by the camera's intrinsic low quality — go figure).

The worst part, of course, is that now I'm back to paying to develop film (plus I only get 12 shots per roll — that's a medium format limitation).

Oh, and one more thing. The Holga is an entirely mechanical camera. The batteries are only there for the flash (which comes in four colors by the way: white, blue, yellow and red). So though it may be of questionable quality, the Holga is very resilient. In fact, you could probably take it just about anywhere in the world and be able to take a picture.

Even places where it's really cold.

Link of the Day: Lomography

File Under: Holga 120CFN; Link of the Day; Photography
Music: Nine Inch Nails "Year Zero"

Permalink | Comments | Trackback

Previous Entry | Next Entry