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Happiness is a Holga- Amateur Photographer
For years I have strived for photographic perfection. I’ve used the best cameras I could afford, the sharpest lenses and the finest grained film available. I spot meter for accuracy, always use a tripod and only press the shutter when the light is at its peak of perfection. This is all very well for producing high quality images, but you know what, all this striving for technical perfection has a tendency to stifle creativity and it wasn’t until I discovered the back-to-basics Holga camera that I realised how much I was missing.
If you’ve never heard of the Holga then let me explain. It’s basically a roll film camera that produces 6x4.5 or 6x6 images (depending on the adaptor you use) on 120 film. It’s made of cheap plastic and resembles a point and squirt camera that a child would get from a toy shop. It is built in China and developed as a cheap camera for people with little money so they too could enjoy photography. It cost me £30, as mine is a deluxe model with a glass lens, the cheaper, previous design only had a plastic lens, so as you see, I still insist on a bit of quality from my cameras! The camera even has a built in flash and if you are willing to pay a £10 extra premium, you can have a model that has coloured filters that fit over the front of the flash.
So, what’s the big deal about this camera then? Well, it’s the kind of picture that it produces that is really special, and just as well, as the camera itself is, pretty basic. Apart from a sharp, sweet spot in the centre of the image, the rest of the frame towards the edges blurs away, just as if you had smeared a great lump of Vaseline over the lens. As well as blurring though, the corners also vignette and although my model seems okay, other cameras may leak light, but on all models, including mine, the back comes of quite easily, so I use gaffer tape to keep mine secure.
As for exposure and focussing, well this is a basic as it gets as well. You get two shutter speeds, 1/100 and bulb, selectable by a switch on the bottom of the camera, also best held in place by gaffer tape. The camera also has two aperture settings f11 and f8, selected above the lens with a switch (this ones stiffer, so no gaffer tape required!), illustrated with symbols showing sunny and cloudy respectively.
Focussing on the other hand, is state of the art predictive AF…. only joking! It uses the same symbol style settings as the aperture selection. There are four-distance settings- 1m, 2m, 6m and 10m-infinity. Just like a kiddies camera, these are symbolised with different sized groups of people for their distance together with a mountain for infinity. Also like a kiddies camera, these aren’t very accurate and therefore it’s worth taking each shot at several of these settings to ensure at least one picture is sharp.
A lever at the side activates the spring shutter and you manually wind on the film with a thumbwheel on the top plate, which obviously makes multiple exposures easy by not winding on for the next shot- even if you don’t want to! A simple push-on lens cap protects the ‘precious’ glass lens, but I tend not to use it, as it’s easy to leave it on by mistake.
If you can master all these complicated controls and (there's a two page instruction manual if you get lost) then you are ready to shoot some film and this is where the Holga comes in to its own. Load up with some ISO 400 colour negative or mono film (your local camera shop will thank you for buying some of these dusty packets off his film shelf) and away you go. Forget the tripod and just snap away, carefree and let your creative juices flow. Using the camera is like a breath of fresh air, as you find new subjects to shoot and a new way to shoot them and as I have found, shooting subjects that I would otherwise have just walked straight past.
Once you get the results back then you realise what all the fuss is about. The images, with their blurred edges, dark corners and only sharp in the centre, have a unique quality all of their own and are beautifully evocative. Grown up pictures from a child like camera.
Could you achieve the same results from a normal digital camera image in Photoshop? Probably, with a lot of work, but with none of the fun, so I’m quite happy to let the Holga get these wonderful results in its own way.
I’m not alone in having a passion for the Holga, as there’s a whole community out there. Search the web and you’ll find websites dedicated to the camera, obscure accessories available for it and forums for fellow users to comment on the camera, as well as upload their own unique pictures to online galleries. October 20th 2007, was even officially World Toy Camera Day (toy camera’s being the official name for this type of camera, as there are other variants around as well), when photographers were encouraged to get out and shoot some film on this special day. 
I’m not sure if I will make any money from these images like my other pictures, but I don’t care really, as I have had so much fun using the camera and anyway, it gives me something else to do when the weather is not so good for my normal landscape photography. On such occasions I know I can still go out and find great pictures with the Holga and funnily enough, this is how some of best pictures to date with the camera have come about. Using it, takes me back to when I picked up a camera for the first time and was shooting anything and everything to develop my skills. I feel like a kid again. A kid with a new toy, a toy camera no less.
© Craig Roberts
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