Holga to the rescue!

Its me again,
I wanted to reach out to the watchers of our blog and let you know my faith in photography is not only always renewed, but also in constant change and full of inspiration. It is a huge challenge to find a slight window for personal projects as our studio has been in a constant state of movement. Couple that with being a busy dad and you can imagine our surprise when our fine art work almost falls off the radar every year.

A few months back I was at my local pro-camera store and I was looking at all the old Mamiya medium format cameras, as well as a Rolleiflex twin lense 4x5 camera that I grew up on. What do I see on the top shelf full of dust... a Chinese made 4x5 Holga that I actually owned at one point.
(I thought it was Russian all theses years!)

For those of you who would love to play with this sort of idea, the Holga has its own cult following and for a medium format camera... its a huge piece of crap!
But, here in lies the beauty and simplicity of the camera itself. A Holga has a plastic lens and really, plastic everything even loading 120 film can be tricky and the light leaks and lens distortion is what I am attracted to. Its the flaws that make it an art.


The Holga camera was designed by T. M. Lee, and first appeared in 1982 in Hong Kong. At the time, 120 roll film in black-and-white was the most widely available film in mainland China. The Holga was intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events. After the cameras began to be distributed in the West, some photographers took to using the Holga for its surrealistic, impressionistic scenes for landscape, still life, portrait, and especially, street photography. In this respect, the Holga became the successor to the Diana and other 'toy' cameras previously used in such work.

I am adding a recent image with that represents a Holga's light leaks and fuzzy lens.
-Truly a Piece of art and refreshing step back from our Pro Bodies of today.


P.S
Southeastern Camera in Raleigh has a few left that are lonely for some street shooting!