The box in which the Holga resides
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Dating In Hong Kong On FirstClickFriend.Com Offers Online Dating Services And Online Personals For All Regions In Hong Kong. Dating In Hong Kong Can Be Really Successful Ith FirstClickFriend.Com The Holga 120S is made in
China. It comes in a blue box with 'Made in China' written on the back.
That's all I know about the background of the camera, and after looking
on the internet it appears that I am as knowledgeable as the next man.
The camera itself is extremely cheap (about $20 from eBay) and basic.
It has three controls - a film advance knob, a shutter, and a manual
focus control which ranges from three feet to infinity. There's a fourth
control that supposedly switches the camera from f8 to f11, but it doesn't
actually work.
The camera is mass-produced and made out of plastic. It's quite rugged,
like a child's toy, but not particularly precise. It allows stray light
onto the film, the frame advance mechanism is quite loose (something
which causes the film to 'buckle' slightly, pushing parts of the image
out of focus), and, most striking of all, the lens is made of plastic,
and is very inaccurate around the edges.
What makes it interesting? Firstly, it uses medium-format film. Medium-format
(or '120') film is physically larger than common 35mm film and captures
more detail. Black and white 120 film is relatively easy to develop
at home, and it has a much higher 'gadget factor' than 35mm - instead
of lurking within a plastic container, it comes wrapped around a spool.
Secondly, the poor build quality and dodgy lens can be positive attributes,
provided you aren't looking for definitive image quality. The blurred,
ill-formed edges and streaks of leaking light give the Holga's images
an otherworldly, timeless quality - with black and white film, the images
usually look like the opening titles of Bagpuss (you know, the
bits with Emily). Lens flare manifests itself as an apocalyptic white
splodge, whilst the manual winding control allows you to create ghostly
double-exposures.
Unless you are obsessed, it's not possible to create pin-sharp, perfectly-focussed,
perfectly-exposed images with your Holga. This is extremely liberating.
Instead of worrying about the technicalities of photography, you are
forced to concentrate on the image itself.
Thirdly, the Holga is easy to modify. In fact, it almost forces you
to tinker with it - out of the box, it is set up to take 16 relatively
conventional 6x4 images, but can easily be altered to take 12 6x6 images
(with the Holga's trademark blurry edges). Further modifications involve
taping the body up in order to keep light out, all the way to fitting
a bulb release and adjustable aperture settings. Pre-modified examples
can be bought from eBay, but as they are hand-made they are quite expensive.
Which leads to the fourth and most important point in the Holga's favour
- it's cheap. Professional medium-format cameras cost anything from
£300 to a hefty four-figure sum. To buy a Holga from eBay and
import it to Britain costs a twentieth of that figure.
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Unfortunately, Jessops cropped off the distinctive edges. Bummer. Be
sure to tell whoever is developing the film not to do so. Compare this
with the following crude scan of the negative, paying particular attention
to the estate car on the left and the gap between the glass shopfront
and the edge of the frame on the right:
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The Holga has some drawbacks,
however. Unless you have the equipment and time to do it yourself, 120
film is fiddlier to develop than 35mm film. High-street shops
usually have to send
the film off to a bigger lab, where it is developed by hand before being
sent back. Jessops, for example, charge £7 per roll, and they take
at least a fortnight to create a set of prints. Professional studios will
develop the film in a day, but it will cost twice as much, and unless
you are fairly certain of how to specify your requirements, the results
might not be as attractive (they tend to reproduce your negative with
as little processing as possible, whereas a mainstream store will automatically
compensate for bad exposure). Compare this with an average of £5
for next-day delivery of 35mm film at your local Snappy Snaps, and don't
forget that, if you use the Holga's 6x6 format, you will only have 12
images per roll (against 24 or 36 for 35mm film). If you mess up, it'll
cost you.
If nothing else, this stifles experimentation. With 35mm film most people
can afford to take lots of pictures and weed out the boring ones. To produce
the same amount of images as a typical roll of 35mm, your Holga will cost
at least three times as much.
The other drawback is that, unless you tinker with it, the Holga is seriously
limited, if only because the shutter is fixed (at roughly 1/250th of a
second). You are restricted to taking photographs in bright sunlight,
outdoors. You can build up exposure time by simply taking several shots
of the same image on a single frame (see the following example), but it's
an inexact science. That said, Jessops worked wonders with the photograph
above, which was taken on a rainy day.
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This image is composed of multiple exposures on a single frame, in an
attempt to compensate for a lack of light. Judging by the strip lights
above the train, four exposures were taken, equating to (if my maths are
correct) 1/100th of a second. More were needed.
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