For years the Holga was m known as a little toy camera with its own cult following. A plastic camera with plastic lenses which later influenced the design of the Lomography Diana F+, the Holga lacked the marketing and millions of designer customizations of the Lomography option. Couple this with a few really tough times in the photo market within the past few years and you’ve got a recipe for death. After being put to rest in 2015, it seems like the little camera which gave birth to things like the Holgaroid and one of the cooler pinhole camera options on the market is going to be making a return. This follows the whole load of really amazing things that are happening this year in the analog film photography community.
It was originally thought that after Tokina shut down the factory producing the Holga camera that the original molds were all gone. But according to Freestyle Photographic, it’s going to be making its return very soon after another factory found the molds to produce the camera.
The Holga is a plastic camera that helped develop the moniker of “toy cameras”. In fact, you could probably argue that after the Kodak Brownie, it’s probably the most iconic option in photography history. The camera takes medium format 120 film and shoots in either 645 or 6×6 format. It’s got a locked shutter of 1/100th and generally speaking could be best off with a flash. However, that needs to be a powerful flash, as the only two aperture settings are f8 and f11. When you’re talking about medium format cameras though, that really isn’t incredibly slow of an aperture. Lots of photographers used it as a Holgaroid–the hack introduced to make it shoot Instant film photos. Others have shot lots of pinhole images with the camera.
So when it hits the market in July of this year, we can expect the phenomenon to be rekindled–though it’s going to have a lot of competition with Instax Square and a whole lot of others.
Check out more over at Freestyle Photographic.
