The Holga was developed in China to provide a camera to the Chinese working class. They were fans of 120 format film at the time, so it’s a medium format camera, made of plastic so it was easy and cheap to produce for the masses. The original had two f-stops (f8 and f11), a fixed shutter speed of 1/100th of a second, and a plastic lens that could be focused from 3 ft to infinity. It was, and if we’re being honest still is, an total piece of crap of a camera.
The Holga is poorly made. The plastic that makes up its body isn’t particularly good plastic. It either comes straight from the factory with light leaks or tends to develop them over time. The lens is plastic and also not well made so focus is entirely random between cameras. You may get one that is sharp in the middle to varying degrees, or you may not. There is heavy a vignette. The camera back gets looser with use and will eventually just randomly fall off if you don’t gaff tape that sucker on. It’s bad.
It was also, in its time, hugely popular in China. The Chinese loved taking photos and this was the camera they could buy. There were no options, no free market with other cameras with different or more features or cameras that were better made at a higher price point. It was an option of buy the Holga or don’t buy the Holga. And they bought the Holga. Until 35mm film penetrated mainland China and became popular.
With fewer people buying the Holga in Mainland China, the government manufacturer expanded sales into Hong Kong, and eventually into the rest of the world. And then options became available, because all of a sudden the Holga needed to compete on a free market. It got a cold shoe for a flash and a tripod mount. But that was about it. It didn’t do well and production was stopped.
Then Westerners discovered it. Frustrated and maybe a little worn out with modern cameras and all their amazing features, a small but dedicated group of film photographers fell in love with the Holga and its bare bones, Communist simplicity. Once photographers made the conscious choice to use a plastic piece of crap camera all its flaws became features. The vignette became artistic and the lousy focus of the plastic lens became “soft focus,” again, artistic. Production resumed. The free market had saved the communist camera. Now they come in all sorts of varieties. Some are panoramic, some have multiple colors of built-in flash, there’s even a 3-D model, I think. Also, they now come in fashion colors, not just the proletariat black of the original.
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| This thing is so ugly it’s cute. Here it’s set on the sunny f-stop and the “mountains” focus. |
It’s still plastic and still, really, a piece of crap. But it’s a $35 medium format camera and I had to try it. And I love it. It really is fun, after using a camera that can do pretty much anything I ask of it, to use a camera that will do what IT wants no matter my thoughts or wishes.
Shooting with the Holga is easy. You just put the aperture setting on the clouds or the sun depending on if it’s cloudy or sunny, try to noodle out if you should use the one person, two people, group of people or mountain focus setting, aim the camera in the general direction of what you want to shoot (the viewfinder doesn’t show you what the lens will see) and click.
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| I used the “one person” focus and Lisa came out in focus! |
As I mentioned earlier, each Holga is different. Some people buy several and then pick which to use based on each camera’s peculiarities. I only have the one and feel like I lucked out. It is really pretty nicely focused at the center of the frame but drops of to a kind of wavy out of focus-ness at the edges. The more light I have the heavier the vignette is. I don’t have any light leaks yet. I’ve run a roll of color and a roll or black and white film through it and was pleased with the results. I wouldn’t use it for any sort of professional purpose or to shoot a once in a lifetime event, but as something to carry around and play with, it is absolutely a blast. And it weighs almost nothing, so carrying it around is easy.
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| In bright sun, the vignette is heavy, but I like it |
I’m grateful to live in a capitalist country where my options for pretty much everything are almost inconceivably wide. I wouldn’t want the Holga to be my one and only photography option. But it is really cool to be so blessed with high quality photographic equipment at prices I can afford that I can buy a truly bad piece of equipment and love it for it’s flaws.
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| Just look at the difference in focus from the center to the edge. |
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