Justin L. Fowler, a staff photographer for Illinois’s The State-Journal Register, took some shots of this year’s Illinois State Fair. But he did so in an unusual way:
If you noticed the photographs from today’s Heartland have a different look to them, it’s because they were all taken with a lens made out of plastic. None of that fancy glass from Canon that we usually work with; these were taken with a $25 plastic lens called a Holga.
The original Holga was a plastic “toy” camera that shot 120mm medium format film. I first came to love the camera when I was college and my photojournalism professor gave us an assignment to shoot with toy cameras. The assignment was an exercise in concentrating on the image itself, all you could really do was compose and push the shutter button. You had no control, and that is what made it beautiful.
The cameras produced less-than-stellar photographs in a technical sense. It leaked light on the film causing inconsistent results and you had no control over exposure. Just a setting for cloudy or sunny and the shutter button. That was about it, and I loved it. It was just about you as a photographer — no messing around with camera settings or lenses. Just you, the light in front of you and your subject.
Only problem with that camera nowadays is that it shoots film and medium-format film at that. Neither is easy to find or get processed in Springfield. Thus, my Holga has been collecting dust on my shelf at home, retired like many film cameras. That is until I found that they were selling the Holga lenses with a Canon mount, which meant I could use it on my digital cameras.
This shot in particular, called “Butterflied Sunset,” is absolutely gorgeous.