Office cat living the highlife, modified with CameraBag, using the Helga setting1
I don’t really know much about Holga cameras, other than they seem popular in the digital age, probably because they introduce an element of unpredictability into a photo. I’ve heard musicians add a bit of static (or vinyl record static, more precisely) into their digital music files for the same reason. A bit of analog signal in a digital world.
I’ve never used a Holga, but several iPhone applications emulate the process, as do some Photoshop filters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holga
Footnotes:The Holga is an inexpensive, medium format 120 film toy camera, made in China, appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s cheap construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. The camera’s quality problems have become a virtue among some photographers, with Holga photos winning awards and competitions in art and news photography.
The Holga camera was designed by T. M. Lee, and first appeared in 1982 in Hong Kong. At the time, 120 rollfilm in black-and-white was the most widely available film in mainland China. The Holga was intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events. After the cameras began to be distributed in the West, some photographers took to using the Holga for its surrealistic, impressionistic scenes for landscape, still life, portrait, and especially, street photography. In this respect, the Holga became the successor to the Diana and other toy cameras previously used in such work. A Holga photograph by David Burnett of former vice-president Al Gore during a campaign appearance earned a top prize in a 2001 White House News Photographers’ Association Eyes of History award ceremony.
Recently the Holga has experienced a revival due to the gaining popularity of toy cameras.
- Helga not Holga, probably due to copyright reasons [↩]
Last time I got one it was $20 at Calumet. They’re certainly great for low-fi. No batteries (unless you get the flash version) and light as heck. 120 film though so you pay up the nose for processing these days.
I use mine with my remaining stock of Polaroid Type 80 film (peel-apart). After that, I’ll probably retire it to the shelf.
do you have any samples scanned and uploaded online? A friend in Austex has been asking about Holgas
I’ve got some stuff up on flickr, but not much:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/phule/sets/308868/
It’s even harder to get good scans from 120 film. I have a large format bed scanner at work that I can use, but even that has issues with being able to flatten the roll film enough.