Photography and Cameras: The Holga 120N

The Holga 120N is a fantastic camera with a plastic body and lens.  You may think of it as the daughter of the Diana, another fantastic camera.  It is unpredictable and wonderful for experiments.  It uses 120 roll film and is configurable to take either 12 square pictures or 16 rectangular ones.  It has a nut on the bottom to allow it to be attached to a tripod.  No two Holgas are exactly alike.  Here is a picture of the Holga.

The Holga has two apertures settings: sunny (about f/10) and cloudy (about f/8).  It has two shutter speeds: "B" and "N" (about 1/100 sec).  "B" allows you to hold the shutter open as long as you want.  The 60mm lens, which is likely to be warped, can be rotated to adjust for focus.  The lens has four pictographs to indicate focal distances: "head & shoulders", "couple with child", "seven person group" and "mountain".  The Holga has a viewfinder to allow you to see the image, but no rangefinder to tell you how far away it is.  I built a rangefinder card to assist with this.  To use it, I close my right eye and open my left eye, align the object I want to photograph with the left edge of the card, then close my left eye and open my right eye.  The object will appear above the correct distance indicated on the card.  Here is a picture of the Holga rangefinder card.  It is about 3 inches by 2 inches.

Some of you may be wondering how I made this card.  First, to determine the actual focus of the lens at each pictograph, I removed the back, taped a small piece of wax paper to the focal plane and advanced the camera until an object was in focus.  I noted the distance for each pictograph.  I then made the card using the open eye / closed eye technique.  I had the card laminated at the BSU copy center.  A wonderful thing about the Holga is that it uses 120 roll film and allows you to experiment inexpensively in the darkroom with medium format film. I will post several photos from the Holga.