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Apr 29, 2011

Post II -- Holga

About a week ago, I was searching the internet for my first analog camera and stumbled upon Lomography.com. It's nice website, but God! Those prices. No thank you.

So I searched and read some more. The 'Holga' camera kept appearing, so I decided to look into that.
It seems to take some beautiful pictures. There are loads of photos by Holgas on both Lomography.com and Flickr.com that you can take a look at. I went straight on eBay and bought a Holga 120GFN, thinking the glass lens was of better quality. 

GFN means the it has a glass-lens (G) and a flash (F). The 'N' stands for 'New', because this is an improved version of the originial Holga, which bears the name 'Holga S'.
Other Holgas are the 'N' (plastic lens), 'FN' (plastic lens and a flash) and CFN (plastic lens, COLOUR flash with 4 different colours) and CFGN (Glass lens, colour flash).

I think it cost around $40 incl. shipping, which i understand is a tad expensive. I've read about people picking them up for $15-25 in retail stores in the US, but I don't have access to that, and I don't think those had a flash like the Holga I bought (which adds a bit to the price).

Now, I am still spending loads of time searching the internet and learning, and I haven't received the Holga yet. But I've discovered that there seems to be a difference between the plastic lens (N) and glass lens (GN) Holga. The plastic one appears to be more 'dreamy', which actually is the effect I want. A lot of photos look the same, but I saw a higher quantity of 'sharp' photos with the Holga 120GN when browsing Lomography.com's photo archive, even though both Holgas show both very 'sharp' and 'dreamy' photos.

I also read that the plastic lens gets scratched up more easily. Some think that just adds to the photo's charm, but that's taking it too far for me. So maybe the Holga GFN was the right decision after all.

We'll see what happens.


P

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