The beach at Dymchurch.

I processed this photo with Color Efex Pro 4, to highlight the golden sands as a rich, vivid copper colour. It has an almost metallic sheen, and in fact I have a large copy of this print on my wall at home on Endura Metallic paper.

A hotel in Folkestone by the harbour. It looks rather like the bridge of a giant ship (in fact, that may have been the intention when it was designed).

This photo catches the edge of the main tower, its harsh lines matching those of the street lamp opposite, and contrasting against the soft clouds.

The warm glow of a lost summer’s evening surrounding the deep, dark memories of a simple flower.

Taken one evening in the Oxfordshire countryside. The blurry effect is the result of the cult classic Lensbaby lens, and gives this print a curiously dream-laden feel.

This print is available in my etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/listing/80768350/these-flowers-glowing-darkly-on-a-green

A bee hovers above a field of purple clover.

I took this photo in a field in Kent. The air was heavy with the smell of clover and filled with the buzzing of thousands of bees. I didn’t realise this bee was buzzing past when I took this photo. She even placed herself in a nice place in the frame!

A year or so ago I heard about some weird Japanese digital camera called a Harinezumi, by the unlikely named Superheadz company. It seemed to be some kind of digital Lomo type thing, by a company trying to replicate what Lomography had done in Europe with marketing quirky, designer cameras. It looked interesting, sort of expensive, and it passed me by.

Then a couple of months ago I happened to be at the Lomo reseller shop in Brighton, and was offered a Harinezumi at a knock-down price, with batteries and tiny SD card thrown in. I’m a sucker for unusual cameras, and well… it just seemed too good an opportunity to pass by this time.

Lo-fi
The Harinezumi is not – let’s be clear about this – a good camera. In fact its image quality is about on a par with a very cheap mobile phone. Apparently each batch of Harinezumis comes with a slightly different sensor, so almost every camera will give a unique type of image. Generally, though, you’ll get something along the lines of massively saturated and bright, with bleached whites and reds that will hurt your eyes. Not images for the faint-hearted, or purists looking for subtly balanced tones.

Hundreds and thousands
Where the Harinezumi really works is in its ability to capture thousands and thousands of small, low quality photos of life’s missed moments, ephemera, the barely seen and rarely noticed. The Harinezumi fits easily and nicely in the palm of a hand, and weighs almost nothing. It’s stupidly easy to carry it round taking snaps of anything and everything. Even a small micro SD card can take a couple of thousand photos. Surely a few of those will really stand out? It’s the shotgun approach to photography, and it certainly is fun.

Mystery shots
The philosophy behind the camera was, apparently, to capture something of the spirit of the days when you took a photo, and just had to trust that it had somehow worked. No peeking at a screen to see if it was just right, with the inevitable dozen or so follow-up shots to get it just right. It is actually possible to review your shots on the go, but not by default. I prefer to just keep snapping away, and then wait till I’ve downloaded the photos to my iPad for the moment of truth.

Lag

The Harinezumi does have a few flaws though. At least in the model I have (which I think is now a year or two out of date). Startup times are about 3 seconds, and you can’t take more than one photo every 3 secs or so. This is frustrating for a camera that ams to be super-snappy, because you’re never quite sure if you’ve even taken a shot. I suppose you could argue it fits with the slightly chaotic approach to photography that cameras like the Harinezumi foster.

The other thing you’ll notice if you’re moving quickly is that rather than blur you might get rather stretched images. This is a bit like I used to get on my old iPhone 3G, presumably because the sensor wasn’t very fast.

Power off
Another real annoyance is the auto power-off feature. Every couple of minutes the camera switches itself off to save power. Actually, that’s a reasonable enough feature. What’s annoying is that pressing the big shutter button doesn’t turn it back on. Only the power button does that. But if you’re wandering round snapping this and that from the hip, you’re not going to notice that the Harinezumi’s powered-off and therefore needs a quick tap of the power button before your next shot.

Ooooo… the number of times I’ve missed what I thought was a particularly nice, sneaky shot. Aaaaargh…

Battery life is pretty poor (a few hours of snapping), and unless you want to spend a small fortune in CR2 batteries you’ll need to get some rechargeables. I’m not quite sure how such a minimal camera uses so much power, but it does.

Video
A great feature of the Harinezumi is its video. Again, we’re a very long way from HD video here. But the lo-fi quality of the image lends videos a fun, almost filmic home video quality. Perhaps my bad Harinezumi video gives you an idea of the sort of shaky, bright videos you’ll be able to take. Lucky you.

Conclusions
The Harinezumi is a fun camera that I very often carry round with me. It’s light, tiny, but not cheap. I managed to pick one up for a shade under £100. Image quality is terrible, but does capture some kind of lo-fi fun in a very unique way. The video mode is a nice little added extra for capturing snippets of life. If you love toy cameras and have reason to treat yourself, give the Harinezumi a try. There really is nothing else like it out there.

Well, in fact not from the Volga. In fact not even from Russia or East Germany or any other eastern European country, current or past. Despite the name, the Holga is a cheap, plastic (some would say “toy”) Chinese camera, originally designed in the early 80s, and now a mainstay of the Lomographic movement. It’s famous for its generally poor construction, light leaks, and curiously evocative medium format images.

A typical Holga photo. Bright, vignetted, and a bit of light leaking in.

Plastic box
There’s not a lot to say about the Holga’s technical specs. It’s basically a not-very-light-tight plastic box, with a simple plastic lens, and which takes 120 film (ie 6cm x 6cm negatives). The lack of control and geekery is in many ways very liberating. Just take a photo. Don’t worry about exposure. Don’t worry about aperture. Don’t even worry about focussing. After all what’s the point of worrying when your photo’s going to be a bit strange anyway? Positive film can be fairly forgiving in terms of exposure anyway, and normally the Holga’s imprecision can be compensated for very well in the processing lab (more of which later).

Despite the lack of technical features, here’s a few points of interest:

Aperture
Yes there’s an aperture switch (“sunny” vs “cloudy”), but it doesn’t actually do anything. Well, it doesn’t actually do anything useful. It does move an aperture plate over the back of the lens, which is meant to make the aperture smaller, or bigger. It’s hard to say. Either way, owing to a very strange piece of engineering design the Holga’s aperture plate makes absolutely no difference to the aperture size. I admire that level of persistence with futility.

Focus
The Holga has a simple 60mm plastic lens, which can be focused. You might wonder why I’d even bother to mention an ability to focus a lens, but you’ll be beginning to realise that on the Holga it’s pretty much the only control you have.  However even focus doesn’t matter all that much. a) you’re not going to get very sharp photos anyway because of the plastic lens; b) the aperture is relatively narrow so you’re going to get quite a bit in focus anyway without doing much.

Black and white works well too

Bulb
There’s also a “bulb” switch. It works. So you can take long exposure shots if you really want to. This might seem like an impossible luxury on such a camera, but in anything darker than standard daylight, the bulb switch is pretty useful. The Holga only takes photos at f8 and 1/60 sec. ie. reasonably light, even with an ISO 400 film. Of course you have to guess roughly how long to hold the shutter for. In true Holga style it’s not worth working it all out precisely. In slightly gloomy conditions, or indoors, you might want to say “one” to yourself, which is about a third of a second. Of course if you’re using the built in flash (see below) you won’t need to worry too much about this, but it’s always nice to get a longer exposure with flash to get interesting motion-blur effects.

Flash
My CFN, a popular model, has a built in flash with revolving colour wheel offering red, yellow, blue, and good old white light. This is a bit of a gimmick perhaps, but can give rather interesting effects in low light. It’s not a strong flash, so you’ll need to get in close. It’s mainly handy as a bit of fill-in flash, or to add an element of fun to your darker photos.

Multiple exposures give a very 'layered' feel...

Double exposure
A nice trick that cheap cameras can do easily is double (or even triple) exposure. The winding mechanism on a Holga is completely manual, to the extent that it’s up to you to wind the film on until you want to stop winding. Or not. It’s in fact all too easy to forget to wind the film on at all, and to merrily snap away on the same bit of film. This can give some very strange, ghostly effects. It can also lead to total chaos. So it’s as well to choose your multiple exposures with at least some thought for what the final image might look like.

Process
The greatest barrier to entry for medium format cameras like the Holga is the medium format film you’ll need. Thankfully film has undergone a bit of a renaissance in recent years, so buying 120 film isn’t a problem online. Processing is a little trickier, but you should find mail order labs (mostly in London) that can deal not only with 120 processing, but with the quirks of a Holga photo. I’ve found West End Cameras to be pretty useful, although there seem to be a reasonable number out there. If you have a lab nearby you’re very lucky!

Of course you could always process your films yourself. Certainly it’s not too hard with black and white. Although that’s only half the story because you’ve then got to print/scan your negatives somehow. It’s all too much of a faff to be honest, and it’s just easier to pay a professional lab to do it all for you (about £10 a film).

Mod
The Holga is capable of taking the more standard 35mm film with a little modding. There are endless descriptions of how to do this online – just search for “Holga 35mm mod” on Google. An example of a clear description is: http://www.eleanorjane.co.uk/blog/2009/07/holga-mod.html. The idea of a 35mm mod isn’t at all to do with the ease of using 35mm film, it’s the fashionable “sprocket hole” effect you get as the whole 35mm film gets exposed, not just the bit between the sprocket holes. In fact film exposed in this way is harder to get processed, and many cheaper labs won’t know what to do. Again, some specialist labs do know exactly what to expect, and will process your film appropriately (although often at a premium price).

Holga images don't have to be bright and garish.

Conclusions
The Holga CFN is a lovely little camera. It’s cheap (even with the normally hefty Lomographic markup) at around £30 on ebay, almost disposable, fun, unpredictable, moddable, and capable of taking some really nice photos. Forget all those iPhone lookalike apps that try to recreate the photos that a Holga gives you. This is the real thing!

With the cheapo element of fun comes a price. 120 film isn’t widely available, although you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding it fairly cheaply (say, £3 a roll) online. Processing labs are few and far between these days, but you should be able to find mail order labs online who are more than capable of processing and scanning your negatives. But typically you’ll find it costs about £10 per roll to do that.

So medium format Lomography doesn’t come cheap, particularly when you realise you only get 12 shots on a roll of film for the classic 6×6 square look. That works out at about a pound a shot.

In this age of virtually free digital photography, that may sound a lot of money. It is. But the price of shooting with a Holga does focus the eye somewhat. You get to appreciate each shot you take. As an occasional treat, as a brief glimpse of photography as a physical process, I think using a Holga is well worth the money and effort.

He’s an Arsenal man, and he’s on a beach.

Taken on Westward Ho! beach a few years ago, on a Lomo LC-A. There’s something vaguely homo-erotic about the Arsenal man. I’m pretty sure he’d be horrified.

Criss-crossing lines on a sunny winter beach.

This is a double exposure taken on a Diana F+ on Botany Bay beach, Kent. No Photoshop phiddling was used in the making of this photo…

A newly-built house on the beach near Dungeness.

Taken on my Canon EOS 5D MkII, I tweaked this a little in Silver Efex Pro to try to give it a stronger, sparser feel. Perhaps something like an old American frontier building from the 20s or 30s? Certainly Dungeness has a very atypical atmosphere. Everything about it is unlike anywhere else in the UK.

A beached boat lost in the fog.

I took this on Dungeness beach with a Fed-5 1980s Soviet camera. Thick fog. The photo is rather out of focus, and shot on grainy film. This gives the scene a ghostly look which I hope conveys the sense of calm abandonment of Dungeness beach on a heavy, foggy day.