Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Seattle, Washington, USA

There's something a little off about paying thousands of dollars for a state of the art 22 megapixel digital camera, then shopping around for the crappiest plastic lens you can lay your hands on.

The Holga, a twenty dollar Chinese plastic toy, was long one of my favorite cameras. In the old days of film, I'd come home with hundreds of rolls of Velvia and a dozen or two poorly wound 120's of Scala or Tri-X. When it all came back from the lab, I went straight to the Holga film. With color slides, I pretty much knew what was the box. The Holga suffered from light leaks and blurry nonsense when it wasn't falling apart in your hands, but still. But once in a while some magic creapt in. With the twilight of film, I left my beloved toy behind on most trips.

But the nice people at Holgamods.com have found time to glue those crappy, blurry plastic lenses onto Canon lens caps.

My version has a tendency to fall apart in my hands when I try to focus, and every time I pick it up out of the dust, the lens gets a little softer, picks up a bit more flare and I love it that much more.

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