After pondering this investment for a couple of minutes, I finally decided today to further stock up my photographic equipment! I had accidentally been reading about the Holga camera yesterday while surfing online - and today I just happened to see one on the shelf of the MALBA museum store (good Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, btw.!)... So I could not resist to take a step ahead into the middle-format world. Technologically, however, this is certainly a significant step backwards!

Some of you have been complaining about many of my pictures being to clean and picture-postcard-like. I hope to remedy this partly with help of my new, aehem, toy. In brief, a Holga is a crappy china-made 20$ plastic camera with a fixed wide-angle plastic lens and lots of light-leaks. This is why you have to tape the whole thing with black plumber tape after inserting the film in order to avoid all sorts of strange traces on your images. Every camera has many different flaws, but they are considered "personality" in the case of a Holga.

For those of you still wondering what the heck I am talking about, have a look into this article, titled Plastic Fantastic. For those of you with some command of the German language, I recommend this clever and witty review: Instant-Holga. From the latter article I would like to quote a statement about a test image: Es sind so ziemlich alle Abbildungsfehler enthalten, zu welchen eine derart einfache Optik fähig ist, insbesonders sehr gut sichtbare Randunschärfe. (It contains all kinds of aberrations which can be achieved with such simple optics, especially very visible blurring away from the center.)

And the manual praises this unique product with the following words: Your Holga is extremely low-tech, and will eventually wear out. It is designed for simplicity - not longevity.

I will post some of my "works" with this little gem of plastic, that is provided I am not too ashamed of the results. And since this is a (huge) step backwards into the world of analog imaging, I will have to wait until I can get some negatives or prints scanned before I can post them here. Patience, hence.

Honestly, I am quite curious to get some first results back from the lab!