Project: Feaux Holga
By Brian Grossman
5 March 2008
What is it about all these hippies and their Holgas? I just never got it. A crappy plastic box camera, the inferior Soviet equivalent of the Brownie Hawkeye, has become such a groovy fad that factories in Hong Kong are churning out these things by the container load and offloading them onto granola-crunching stoners for fifty bucks a piece.
And the sappy poetry which gushes forth from the pens of these Holga hippies glorifying their overpriced pinholes, prized for their lack of factory quality control, is positively stupifying. Just what is the attraction of this trendy little fad? I really wanted to know but I had a problem. Holgas, Dianas, Lubitel TLRs and most other similarly kitch post-Soviet gear use 120/220 medium format roll film. My negative scanner only takes 35. What to do?
After a bit of googling about I discovered that those clever capitalists in Hong Kong were now churning out 35mm Holgas under the Lomo brand name. Never ones to miss the marketing opportunities presented by a good fad, these things were going for about fifty bucks apiece. Though I have a tremendous respect for the immutable laws of supply and demand, I found it difficult to shell out that many clams for a product which likely cost little more than a buck and a quarter to make. I was determined to find another solution.
What is the essence of the Holga, I pondered. The lens, I concluded. That little two-bit piece of molded clear plastic was the heart of the magic. It is the lens that creates the image; the camera is but a box. And what is it about the Holga lens which makes it such an attraction for the crusty punks of our avocation? Why, its very inferiority. That is the key. I thus set about upon a quest to find the most inferior 35mm lens I could get my hands on for less than the price of a Holga. Such a thing would let me use my favorite cameras with all their bourgeois creature comforts, like variable shutter speeds and through the lens metering, while producing commie-quality imagery. Better yet, my fake Holga apparatus could be mounted and removed at will, allowing me to shoot with real lenses all day and use the Holga-esque glass only when the spirt of the earth mother goddess so moved me.
Having defined my search parameters, I now set about to build such a creature, using only those items I could get from ebay for significantly fewer roubles than a genuine article. Now, what should I look for? Well, what defined the opitically worst lenses of the manual-focus 35mm era?
For starters, zoom lens technology was in its infancy in the 70s and most of the zooms of that era had poor resolution and contrast and vignetted horribly, especially at the shortest focal length. My Franken-holga must begin with a zoom. But who made the worst ones? Fortunately there were a number of gloriously inferior products sold under major brand names during this time. J.C. Penny and Sears marketed off-brand lenses under their own labels. K-Mart had its Focal brand and Ritz camera its Quantaray line. Fortunately it was an even more obscure relic of the era that I was lucky enough to acquire (for seventeen dollars shipped), a Cambron 28-70 f/3.5-4.5. Yes, Cambron the private-labeled house brand of Cambridge Photo made famous in the back pages of Popular Photography advertising unbeatable discounts for unenviable quality.
I worried however that the Cambron zoom may not be just inferior enough. After all, it represented the cutting edge of South Korean opitical technology of 1979. Might this not be a tad sharper than contemporary offerings from Leningrad? How was I to make this lens any worse short of smearing Vaseline on the front element? Why a teleconverter of course! These devices were once the popular choice of suckers who thought they were getting something for next to nothing and either didn't mind or notice the significant optical degradation occassioned by the use of these snake-oil gadgets. How suitable for my purpose.
For ten dollars with shipping I found a good clean J.C. Penny 2x teleconverter to mate with my Cambron. At minimum focal lenght and wide open aperature I would have a 56mm f/5.6 in a convenient Pentax K mount. Perfect.
I mounted the beast on a Ricoh XR-1 (not quite a Holga, but made entirely of plastic) and set about to unleash my beast upon the unsuspecting urban landscape of my hometown. The results were, shall we say, not quite as expected.
For one thing my light meter told me I was overexposing the shots but they came out anything but. All the pictures attached to this essay were taken on the same bright sunny afternoon at wide open aperature and a speed of 1/1000. I shot two rolls of Plus-X developed in Ilfosol for seven minutes at 20 degrees centigrade. The highlights seemed reasonably well exposed but the shadows were quite dark.
I was hoping for that Holga/Lubitel look of a reasonably well focused center surrounded by those characteristic concentric circles of bokeh (if you can call it that) and pronounced edge vignetting. That wasn't exactly what I got.
It occurs to me that I approached the problem of image degradation from exactly the opposite direction taken by the Soviet central planners. Their optics derived their characteristics by being extremely simple using the fewest elements possible. My monster, on the other hand, achieved its image quality by needless complexity, adding additional elements and groups where none were required. Perhaps this explains the results.
At any rate, I most certainly achieved the goal of cheaply and simply creating the poorest quality optic which capitalist technology of the era could produce. Whether my formula will become the basis of some new fad is anyone's guess. Probably not but who knows what a bunch of stoner art students might find groovy tomorrow.
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