New Toy: Holga medium format film camera
You’d think it was Christmas or something. Been treating myself to a few little things lately…the kind of stuff nobody would ever buy for me so it’s all good.
While on another iPhone gathering expedition with a friend in Seattle (which also included picking up a droid and a Rock Band), I stumbled across this beauty at Urban Outfitters:
After getting a Fisheye camera earlier this year (which I must get back from Miss604), I’ve been interested in playing with a Holga camera for awhile now. Both are made by Lomography and I had seen them in Urban Outfitters a few times while down south but it was always the black kit which I waffled on buying more than a few times. When I stumbled across this army green one, it was a done deal – I had to buy it.
The kit came with all kinds of goodies that I’m still going through including the camera itself (which has a wheel for changing the color of the onboard flash), a roll of 100ASA medium format film, a poster, a neck strap, a couple of different manuals, an awesome book of photos taken with the Holga (The World Through a Plastic Lens) and the funniest thing: a roll of black electrical tape! I knew that people had light leak issues with the camera and had seen some taped up but I didn’t realize it was a feature fully acknowledged in the manual.
So I’ve got it loaded up and ready to go – will have to bring it to some holiday parties and see what it can do. More to come once I get the film processed.
“Lomography” doesn’t make anything at all, except piles of money. The Holga is a cheapo $25 Chinese toy camera they re-sell at a crazy markup (get ’em cheaper at holgamods.com), and the Lomo is a $70 camera from Russia to which they somehow got the world distribution rights.
I didn’t find the Holga kit I got to be marked up too bad….the base camera (with colorwheel flash that was in my kit) goes for around $50 on ebay but the kit came with a number of other useful things like a $10 roll of film and a $20 book (value is debatable) among other things which puts it pretty close in value to the the $70 I paid….although Holgamods.com does look interesting.
Actually the whole Lomo thing had it’s start in Vienna a bit over a decade ago, some guys (if I remember correctly) had done an expedition into the “great unknown east” and came across a warehouse somewhere in Hungary I think which was stuffed to the gills with these cameras.
They had no idea what it was and bought a few, then took them back to Vienna and played around with them.
Realizing the “art” in the unpredictability of the original cameras they quickly got a little bit of a cult following and had their first exhibition I think in 2000, then they turned this into a business.
Not sure if the same ones are still involved or not but it clearly has left it’s humble nieche and gotten into the “big business” kinda deal.
Having said this, I got a fisheye2 a few weeks ago and it got me back into shooting film… Now I am trying to get a medium format Mamiya from eBay…. Bastards, Digital was so much cheaper.