Holgariffic
neil posted in Photos, Neil on July 19th, 2007
The Holga. The camera famous for being broken. The cheap plastic lens with light leaks, extreme vignetting, blurry images, soft images in a tacky crappy black plastic body.
People LOVE it because it is so bad. The scary way that people love Penny Farthings, Reliant Robins and caliper brakes. It does’nt take photographs, it makes ART. As if art could be stamped out by a machine alone!
I stayed far far away until I saw images from John Stanmeyer at the VII London seminar. He used the Holga’s wierd effects to add atmosphere to a daylight spirit ceremony. This combined with sound recordings made at the time proved very effective. He even has two of the images in his online portfolio. Here.
After seeing a Strobist article on fitting a holga lens to a Canon (or Nikon) digital body, I decided to see what a Holga’d image I shot might look like. Overall I liked the effect though the constant aperture of f11 or f8 would bug me. Its faked and silly, but its FUN dammit. Thats one of the reasons I shoot pictures. For the shots in this gallery, its perfect. The steps I used can be found here. Going black and white all the time is dull for me in this polychromatic world. So I did’nt.
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