Geek Gadgets
I may have mentioned to a few of you, but for those who don’t know I’ve bought myself a new camera. Yep, another one. Those of you who have seen some of my kit are probably wondering WHY I bought another camera. After all at this point I actually own more camera’s than I have workable limbs. So what on 
earth possessed me to buy yet another one? Well, this one is different.
The last couple of years I’ve been working mostly with 35mm SLR’s, and while I like the results I’ve been getting I just needed something more. Sometimes I worry that I’m some sort of techno-junkie geek grrl hybrid. So I started looking around to see what was out there and found the lomo. But a lomo is still a 35mm camera and it is damn expensive too, out of my price range at the moment. The lomo would have been nice but I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to afford a new camera right now until that is I found a link to the Holga. The Holga is a medium format camera that is so cheap it’s laughable.
It’s from the 80’s, built by the Chinese and it’s er, plastic. That pic looks pretty cool yeah? You look at it and think it’s a relative of a Leica Rangefinder, big and sturdy, with a good lens. Well, you’re wrong. It weighs 200g and the lens is plastic. As is the case, the flash and all the buttons. Plastic.
Ok, saying all the buttons is wrong too, as there are pretty much exactly eh, no controls on it. Remember that fisher-price camera you had as a kid? Well technologically that’s probably a step up from a Holga. There are two main ‘features’ on the Holga 120GCFN. The first is a button to change the aperture from f11 to f8 (marked with a sun or a cloud) and on the lens ring are painted some vague shapes resembling people to gauge your focus. (One person equals close, group of people equals far away, mountain equals infinity.) Of course as this isn’t an SLR when you look through the viewfinder it’s hard to tell exactly what the camera lens is seeing, and until you process the film it’s impossible to tell the lens quality. Which, added to the known problems with the camera regarding light leaks, variation in shutter speed, lack of sharpness etc means that it’s a total crapshoot as to whether anything comes out at all.
Despite all this, or perhaps in spite of all this I bought the camera which arrived, boxed and plastic wrapped last week. The next day I went down to Gunns and bought a few rolls of film to get me started. Since then I have been snapping away as the mood takes me. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people are much more natural around the Holga and it’s easier to take their picture. Because the camera looks and feels like a toy, they don’t feel half as self conscious as when I’m pointing a Nikon with 200mm telezoom in their face. Another bonus is that because the camera is made of plastic I don’t have to worry about it getting knocked about in the bottom of my bag, so now it comes pretty much everywhere with me.
It’s cheap, it’s fun and I’m looking forward to seeing what I’ve captured on film.
Holga goodness on flickr.
