the "digital holga"-- a new breed of photographic craziness
By qi peng
4 Feb 2008
Originally I was fairly big on using my Holga 120 camera with medium-format film for a few months. Typically I would load it up with some Kodak Tri-X or Portra and then bang away doing some random hip or eye-level shots. However, things became more expensive and medium format film was getting to be harder to process as people started to switch to digital. So I had to decide whether I could forsake my beloved Holga into the photographic bin of my studio.
Instead of giving up on the Holga. I thought about modifying it in order to keep on using it. Originally I had wanted to use a digital scanning back and tape that onto the front part of the Holga (while leaving the back completely off) but the medium format backs were rather expensive and still are. So it was a matter of just trying to get only the fabled lens part and applying it to some type of digital body.
So I had a few Nikon digital bodies which I would want to test them with. However, I couldn't really do the modification of the Holga lens myself. So it was a matter of finding someone who could do the project and have the lens focus to infinity unlike most of the self-hack jobs which tend to be imprecise. After considerable amounts of research, I discovered a photo equipment engineering company called S.K. Grimes who was willing to take my Holga plastic lens and retrofit it with a metal Nikon F-mount compatible flange which would rock a new setup accordingly for my art photography.
I sent off the whole Holga to the guys in Rhode Island and in a few weeks, I got back my beloved Holga lens with the apropos Nikon flange. I stuck it on my Nikon D1 which was the only digital body I owned that could matrix meter with any given manual lens. Then I started to bang away the shot and guess the distance between the image plane and the subject by scale focusing. It was a new blessing for my artistic endeavor.
I have been using this setup for quite a number of months now and I am glad to share with you this rather innovative setup. I admit that not too many people know that a Holga can behave very well in the digital world and I dream about owning a full frame Nikon digital body (like the Nikon D3 although I prefer a Nikon D200 or D300 shape and weight with full frame just like the Canon 5D body) so that I can use the plastic Holga with Nikon mount on a much larger digital image than that of the DX format which is cheaper and more common for Nikon shooters.
So enjoy these exquisite digital Holga shots...
