Holga – medium format madness!

March 17, 2010 | Category: photography

I’ve managed to sort out my favorite pictures (so far) taken with my Holga camera and get them scanned in and uploaded.
Although all the pictures here were taken around the Brighton area, they have no particular theme, but, they do show the fantastic low-fi, warm, vintage images the Holga is famous for.

I love the Holga’s simplicity, it’s controls are, essentially, a vague focusing ring and shutter release button. In a world of digital cameras with massive zoom capabilities, face recognition, automatic panorama stitching, vibration reduction etc, I like to be reminded that what is basically a box with a hole in it can capture moments just as effectively and, to me, add more excitement to the process. you’re never quite sure what the final result will look like until you have the photo in your hands – no quickly checking the LCD display on the back! Of course sometimes photos you were looking forward to seeing are ruined by a light leak or other ‘feature’ of the Holga, but others that would be dull are made more interesting by these quirks. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the beautiful crisp photos my DSLR is capable of taking too – viva la difference!

Tags: film, Holga, medium format, photography

2 Comments

Baz
on March 19th, 2010
1
Very nice work! The Holga’s flaws are varied and many, and all of them beautiful (apart from the aperture size thing, that’s just weird). This week, I got asked by squarefrog.co.uk if they could use one of my photos to illustrate sponge-eating!

Have you shot in black and white, yet?
burningflan
on March 19th, 2010
2
Thanks Nice work getting noticed by squarefrog, that place is a goldmine of Holga info!
I haven’t shot in B&W for a couple of reasons…
1) I’m very anti using B&W to create ‘insta-art’, y’know, people convert a dull photo to B&W and think it instantly makes it arty. B&W needs more attention to the lighting and composition IMO and these were the first few rolls off the Holga so were ‘learning’ rolls really.
2) I kind of forgot about the old girl, it was only the other day when I remembered I hadn’t scanned my Holga shots that I went back to them and remembered how much I liked them, that gave me a kick in the ar$e to use it more often!