HolgaLove

I don't have a cameraphone, I just have one of those old skool cell phones that can only, you know, make calls... and sometimes it can't even do that very well. So instead of doing an installment of CameraPhoneLove, I'll do a version called HolgaLove. I went with j's philosophy of working with what you've got and doing it with love- I think that that philosophy is what I'd like to strive for in almost anything that I can think of doing in my life.


I started taking photos pretty young, probably around 11 or 12... not because I thought I was interested in taking photos, but because I was my family's historian. I took photos on all of our family trips. No one was more interested in creating a fantasy of a happy, wholesome family than I was. I think I learned how to frame photos from experimenting during all of those years, but I never really got to learn photography technique or the mechanics behind cameras. So a couple of years ago, after starting to shoot with a digital SLR for a little while, I thought it would be neat to revert back to the basics and see what I could do with film.

I started out with the cheapest option possible: disposable cameras. I shot a few rolls off of disposables and found that I really liked the quality of not getting any second chances, which also means no second-guessing. Whatever image you take is what you get, which makes the image perfect in its own finality, however overexposed or underexposed or blurry. Disposable cameras also give you zero options in terms of focus, exposure, etc. The only decisions you get to make are 1) how to frame the photo, and 2) whether or not to use flash. So I got to see what it was like just to have fun with a camera that I had handy at almost all times.

Then I invested about $50 in a Holga 135, the 35mm version of a plastic camera that was originally manufactured in the 1980s as a super cheap mass production camera in China and Hong Kong. The Holga is constructed in such an inexpensive, shitty way that photos consistently come out with light leaks, vignetting, blurring, and other qualities that one can't even hope to predict. Going with the philosophy of "using what you've got," the Holga is now many photographers' cult favorite because you'll often get really beautiful, soft focus, unpredictable images. To use a Holga, you need to paradoxically care enough to invest in buying and developing film, and also not care a whole lot because you can't ever know how the photos will come out. It's been a good lesson for me around taking photography seriously while also letting go. Here's the first installment of HolgaLove, i.e., doing it with love-