Holga: The Anti-Technology Revolution

thirtyfootscrew — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:06:27 +0000

I’ve been an amateur photographer for coming up to two years now, starting with my Canon 400D I’ve learned a great deal about the subject including how light works, how to compose a photo, how to work the camera, how to post-process, how to build HDRs, etc. etc. The problem is that sometimes it’s easy to let the technical aspects overwhelm the basic urge to play and to have fun, I still love my 400D and I still love photography but I have to remind myself occasionally to stop worrying about sharpness, apertures, shutter speeds and white balance and just take some damned photos!I’m not the only one that feels this way and there’s been somewhat of a revolution going on for a while now where people are migrating from digital to film, not to classic cameras or elite collectors equipment but to plastic cameras, toy cameras.

One of the popular makes of toy camera is Holga, you can pick one up from eBay for $15 / £10 and quite honestly it’s great fun, the lens is plastic, the back falls off occasionally, it can do f8 and f13 only, it’s preset to 1/100th of a second shutter speed and it has pre-set focus points for Portraits, Couples, Groups and Mountains. The whole thing sounds quite ridiculous, and, it is! Most importantly it’s fun and you have little idea how a photo is going to turn out until you get it developed.

It’s great fun and I’ve ordered about 10 rolls of different film to try out (Velvia, B&W, SFX among others) which should be great. If you fancy joining the revolution check out the excellent Square Frog. The camera takes medium-format 120 film giving 12 shots per roll, from my first couple of rolls I only got a few usable photos but since I’ve taken quite a few rolls – you can see the results on Flickr.

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Holga: The Anti-Technology Revolution