I have wanted to try a Holga with a glass lens for ages, so in preparation for this year’s Holga Week I searched for one. I eventually ‘won’ this item for £20.

For once, after buying a cheap Holga, it was perfect. There was no battery residue to clean or flash link to fix. As it was already Holga week when it arrived, I loaded it straight away with an expired roll of Ilford FP4. I intended to push it to 640-800 in processing to enhance the contrast. And there the camera sat, on my desk as I got the worst cold/flu ever. Two weeks in and I am still in the throws of it. That meant I couldn’t go anywhere during the important week, so I took the camera on a ‘fresh air walk’ along my street. So the subjects are my dad..who also had a cold, a selfie of me looking sorry for myself and a random cat.

I developed the film with 510-Pyro and for the first time used Zone Imaging’s Eco Fix. It was very easy to mix and quick working. I think it will be my go-to fix for now.

Here are the results from that roll.

The camera is very simple to use with a basic zone focusing system. For the two shots of my dad reading I used two different flashes, one was the blue, the other the yellow. They give quite different looks in skin tone.

In my example, there is massive vignetting, but I don’t mind that. I can really tell the difference between the glass and the plastic lens of the CFN. I taped the back up to avoid light leaks and to keep the strap lugs in place which were loose on this example.

I love this camera, the simplicity and the results. While researching for this post, I came across this wonderful post and was immediately enthralled. I have followed the author on Instagram and hope to use her ideas to inspire another outing.

For my next ‘fresh air’ walk I put in a new-to-me mask. After my disappointment with the Holga 135 adapter, I looked around for a mask that would show the sprockets. I eventually decided on a 3D print one from this site. I loaded that and a Catlab 320 and went for a short walk.

After developing, with the same chemicals as before. I found the images overlapped after the 3rd one. If it was just one or two, then I would have put it down to my cold and not following the numbers on the winder sticker properly, but it was many of them. So the sticker didn’t work for the new mask. I will have to adapt that later, maybe make my own sticker??

Anyway here are a few of the results.

For a couple of the images, I purposely focused wrong – closer. For some of the others, I liked what the overlapping had done and left them together. For the first one, I took 2 images and put them together post-process as they were a kind of diptych. With the sprockets showing, the scanner had a little trouble getting the exposure right. So in future, I will add a black-out spacer or something.

I love this camera and am tempted to put it on my top ten list. I can’t wait to be rid of my snot machine and have more time to play with it. I uploaded 3 images from the 120 roll to the Holga week site, of course, the two cats and one of dad.