I love photography.  This does not equate to being any good at it.  As a wise person said, an expensive camera does not make an amateur take better pictures.  So I’ve got a few rather cheap pieces of kit.

I’ve got my phone.  I love having the camera on the phone, it means I’ve always got it with me and there’s apps like Vignette and Instagram to do strange and interesting things with.  I’m rather partial to Vignette’s tilt-shift filters but Instagram hasn’t brought those over to Android just yet.

I’ve also got a fantastic genuine-film camera – a H0lga 120.  I’ve recently adapted this to take 35mm film as 120 is (a) harder to get hold of, (b) confuses people when you ask them to develop it and (c) doesn’t easily fit into the scanner to get the images onto the computer.  Compared to the phone it’s a big, clunky piece of plastic junk, but I think it’s wonderful.

The action of using the camera, the physical *click* and wind-round feels lovely.  There’s none of the delay you get with digital, the shutter’s done it’s work before you have time to think.  For those really fast shots it’s superb.  The Holga has it’s drawbacks, of course.  It’s big, it’s ugly and it needs the film manually re-winding in a dark room otherwise you’ve just wrecked the lot.  Double-exposures are very easy to do either deliberately or when you get distracted and forget to wind the film on.  Oh, and if you mis-read the instructions you don’t wind your film on as far as you should and end up with overlaps between frames.  Rather like these: