Down the Nile with a Plastic Camera

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. Forget the digital SLR and instead take a £20 plastic camera to record the holiday of a lifetime in Egypt. It would be an interesting experiment I thought. How would I cope without the automation of a modern camera? Or a decent viewfinder? Or reliability?

That particular resolution lasted, oh about five minutes before better sense prevailed. In the end I did pack the SLR, but the plastic camera came too (with copious amounts of out-of-date film for good measure).

| The camera

My equipment of choice was a Holga, a Chinese-made medium format camera. Some of the best cameras in the world are medium format. Hasselblad. Bronica. That sort of thing. The Holga uses the same type of film as these cameras, but that’s were the similarities end. There is no internal metering. And the focusing is a bit hit and miss. No, it’s very hit and miss. Oh, and did I mention that the image circle doesn’t fully cover the image frame? This results in heavy vignetting around the edge of the image.

What the Holga is though is fun. Which you can’t put a price on…

| The confession

So, basically what we have here are photographs created on an ultra-cheap camera. Shot on a jolly holiday spent on a boat in the company of some rather charming people. I really don’t think I can pass this off as gritty social documentary…