Image of the Week: Skylar, Nantahala, North Carolina, June, 2007

I've always prided myself on using the latest and highest quality gear and techniques in my photography. I spend hours on the preparation and the execution of an image to insure maximum sharpness and clarity, as well as a lot of time at the computer editing raw images to find the few (or single!) frames from a shoot that really worked.

That is, unless I'm shooting with a Holga.

Developed as a cheap way for the average Chinese citizen to engage in the burgeoning hobby of photography, the Holga has enjoyed a surge of Western popularity during the last few years. Basically, it's a toy camera that leaks light like a screen door. The plastic meniscus lens is barely sharp in the center and looks like it's coated with Vaseline in the corners. Unlike your swanky DSLR or digital Point & Shoot, you look through a viewfinder and not through the lens itself, so focusing is a guessing game. Shooting with a wide range of two shutter speeds (1/100 and Bulb) and two apertures (ƒ/8 and ƒ/11), it records blurry, flare-ridden images on 120 medium format film.

So, why do people like it?

There's a certain panache to the low-fidelity output of the Holga. It's retro-chic. A number of amateur and professional photographers find the flaws to be aestheically pleasing. The Holga produces an image "out of the box" that many shooters would spend hours in Photoshop trying to emulate. I like it because it's freeing, and every image I shoot with it can be a wonderful surprise, or a crushing failure.

This week's image is one of Skylar, the daughter of some close friends who recently accompanied Amy and I on a vacation to the mountains of North Carolina. A true child of the digital age, Skylar was sneaking peaks at the back of my Holga to see the image I had just shot. She was disappointed to learn my obsolete toy doesn't feature an instant image preview.

Is this week's image a wonderful surprise, or crushing failure? Let me know what you think.

Technical Data

Using a Nikon SB-26 hotshoe flash in Auto Mode to fill in the heavily backlit scene, I exposed the frame of Kodak Tri-X 400 in the Holga's Bulb mode for approximately 1 second at ƒ/8. I developed the film in 1:25 Rodinal for 7 minutes at 68°. The film was scanned on an Epson 4990 and warm-toned in Adobe Lightroom before printing on an Epson 3800.

Other Images of the Week