The Holga gods are displeased.

 The Holga is a cheap camera, some might say it is manufactured like a toy, that is made in Hong Kong and has become something of minor obsession for me over the last 20 years. The Holga is made of the kind of plastic that is normally reserved for scale models of aircraft such as Spitfires or Hurricanes. People will tell you that they are terrible cameras, not worth your time and don't produce good results.  Those people are tweaking the ear of the Holga gods and no good will come of it.

Recently, I have neglected my Holga and it has sat on a shelf and gathered dust.  That was until Dave Whenham decided to take his Holga, affectionately known as the "AndyCam" as I gifted it to him, for a walk and he produced a roll of nice negatives.  Spurred on by this effort,  I loaded my own Holga and sallied forth to expose the film.  The results were encouraging and so a second film was loaded and on a warm February afternoon, I went out again with the Holga.

The problem was that I had caused consternation in the Holga heavens by my long lay up of my Holga and so the Holga gods plotted to teach me a lesson.

The Holga gods did their worst

Now the thing is that it would be easy to work with the Holga, with it's single shutter speed and aperture to produce some artistic, if not good, images.  It would be further exciting to understand how to use development to give control to the photographer.  Even better would be to use filters  to modify how light is captured.  At this point it would be only to easy to proclaim oneself a "Master" of the Holga.

To do so would be folly of the highest degree.

You see every film that one shoots in a Holga is subject to the agreement of the Holga gods and it is they who decide if a frame is going to be good or not.  Moreover it is they who will decide if the whole roll is to be a right off or whether you will have a couple or more of good exposures.  It really has nothing to do with the photographer and it would be good to bear that in mind.

The Holga gods are also able to interfere in the film processing department to either allow or foil any attempt at compensating for the shortcomings of the camera.  In short they get into your mind and interfere with your thought processes in the same way as they invisibly guided the photographers hand during the taking of a shot.

How many times have Holga users looked at the film and couldn't remember a frame or two being shot?  This is because the Holga gods have taken over and are using the photographer as a puppet.

Blurred and Overexposed, Ye gods!

So displeasing the Holga gods isn't a clever thing to do if you'd like some reasonable photographs from the little plastic camera.

Now to my tale...

Last Saturday I needed to collect a relative from the coach station in Swansea at 12:30. As coach arrival times are something of an elastic concept, the waiting time for collecting people is only 10 minutes and enforced by cameras, I decided to arrive early and park at Swansea Marina.  As the coach arrived I would receive a text message and drive over to the collection point.  Excellent a plan was made!

But the Holga gods had not forgotten my, almost two years, neglect of the Holga and they had nearly missed seeing me pick the camera back up and start using it again.  Worse, I started dishing out tips and advice to others and setting myself up as something of a Holga guru. The Holga gods decided this would not do, it would not do at all.

Before leaving home, I loaded a roll of FP4 Plus into my Holga and in doing so checked the camera over. Getting in the car, I nonchalantly threw the Holga onto the passenger seat along with my hat, a neck warmer and a magnifying glass. My causal handling of the camera did not go unnoticed by the Holga gods and so incensed were they that they decided something had to be done immediately.

As I drove towards Swansea Marina, the traffic got really bad and I inexplicably found myself constantly in the wrong lane.  Eventually I arrived at the car park and had to try every ticket machine until I found one that worked.

Then, after I put the parking ticket on the dashboard, I set off on foot to shoot 12 exposures before collecting the relative.  It was a lovely, bright and warm sunny day and I was pointing my camera here and there, using the magnifying glass as a close up lens when the shot called for it.  The familiar snick of the shutter operating was comforting and it was not long before I has just one more frame to expose.

There was a private charter embarking and the gang plank offered a unique view of the front of an old rusting ship.  I enquired if I could go down and make my exposure? Permission granted I went down the gang plank and it was the work of a moment to raise the Holga to my eye and operate the shutter.  Job done.

A normally inaccessible shot.

I wound on the film and packed the camera away as my phone was buzzing and my collection was ready to be picked up.

And so it was.

When I got home, and following luncheon of sausage and chips from the chip shop, I set about processing the film. I used semi stand development for an hour so I had some time to spare.  It was then that, to my horror, I noticed that the button on the bottom of the camera had been set to bulb. All those lovely shots would now be ruined. Oh my, the Holga gods had struck again!

As I pulled the processed film from the developing tank, my worst fears were confirmed, really dense negatives and evidence of blur due to the long exposure cause by camera shake.

I hung the negatives to dry and tried to forget the experience.

It wasn't until yesterday, Sunday, that I looked at the negatives, by now dry, hanging sadly.  I took them down and decided to scan them for the laughs, as they say.

While many of the pictures were in fact dreadful and unusable, some were not that bad and a deal better than I had any right to expect.

The Holga gods had done it again!  They had taught me a lesson that I'd thought I'd learned long ago.

Better than I could have expected!

The lesson is this; The photographs that you get from your Holga is subject to the good graces of the Holga gods and don't forget it!

You have been warned!