About a year and a half ago, I was sitting on my couch, much like I am right now. My Saint Bernard, Hugo, was snoring, much like he is now. While listening to Hugo snore, my brain needed to distract itself from the noise (no matter how hilarious it is to have a dog that snores louder than any human I have ever seen!). A holga was sitting on my coffee table beside an old Bronica Polaroid back. Like any good photographer, I thought “how can I wreck these two items and make them one good one? I know! I am gonna try and make my own holgaroid! BRILLIANT!!!” I had seen premade holgaroids online and decided that it would be way more fun to make my own than order one and wait for it to arrive. So it began…..
The Steps to making your own Holgaroid
First, you need to decide if you can permanently destroy a holga. If you are having troubles coming to terms with this, just remember that you will eventually be making your holga something better than it was. If you can’t bring yourself to wreck and rebuild one of yours, steal one from a friend. Next you will need an old Polaroid back. The nice part is that you can use one from a hassleblad, Bronica, Pentax 67 or any other medium format back you can find. Don’t worry if the darkslide is missing, you won’t need it anyway! The important things are that the back seals and rollers are in working order. OK, so you have your Holga and your back, now what? Well, here is a list of the tools that you will need to start your surgery:
• A sharp utility knife
• Gaffer’s tape
• Either hot glue or an epoxy (hot glue is easier to work with)
• A sharpie marker to trace out the cut lines on the Holga back
• A pair of flat nosed pliers
Alright, so we have our tools. Now we start to cut, hack and of course, make sure that we end this project with as many fingers that we started with.
Step one: Take off the Holga back. Inside, you usually see this:
We want it to look like this:
This is where the knife comes in. Take the blade and cut into the corners of the inside mask. One you have all the corners cut, take the pliers and bend the sides of the mask until they separate from the camera.
Once you have all the inside plastic pieces out, turn your attention to the viewfinder. Unfortunately with the holgaroid, you will lose the finder, but you can always add one on top , or just point the camera at the subject and guess. I find that to be way more fun anyway.
With the viewfinder, all you need to do is grab an edge with your pliers and pull or you can cut it off, too. This will usually leave the plastic finder rattling in the camera, but otherwise, it will do no damage. This finder needs to be removed so that the back can fit flat on the Holga. Trust me, you won’t miss it.
OK, with that gone, the camera itself is ready. Really. That is all you need to do to the camera body. I promise.
Now we’ll take the Holga back and the Polaroid back. Open the Polaroid back, remove the darkslide. Use the ruby window on the Holga back as the center point and place the Polaroid back on the holga back. Take your marker and trace the outline of the image opening of the Polaroid back onto the Holga back. Now you have the outline of where to cut. With the knife, cut out the shape out. Again, count your fingers so you know how many you started with.
Heat up your hot glue gun or mix your epoxy. Put a bead of glue on the Holga back, around the cut out shape and don’t be cheap with it either. We want it to stick and stick good. Take the opened Polaroid back and place it over the Holga back and press into place. Once it is on, add an extra bead of glue to fill any gaps between the backs. Once this dries, take your glue and go around the outside edges, again, to make sure it sticks together well. Let the glued pieces sit to allow the glue to dry (about 10 minutes with hot glue and usually a few hours with epoxy). After it is dry, take the Gaffer’s tape and tape around the inside edges. This will make it pretty light tight.
So are you ready? Are you sure? OK……..
Take the new Holgaroid back and put it on the body. You will be able to use the original clips to keep the back in place. That’s it. You’ve done it!
Now go and get some film. You can use any Polaroid 100 AND Fuji’s 100 without doing any modifications to the back.
And remember, film leads to a holga, holga leads to photographs, photographs lead to instant, instant to holgaroid and holgaroid leads you to the DARKSLIDE…. I am such a nerd….
Stop reading. Go and get some film already!
Check out some of my homemade holgaroid shots at : www.jimslobodian.com
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Comments
Sexiest. Post. Ever.
That seems surprisingly simple! I’ve wanted to do this for a while but I thought it would be really difficult and I’d end up ruining two cameras.
Do you not need a diopter of some kind?
some folks like to put a square mask on top for framing, but i think it is more fun just pointing the lens at the subject!
I meant something to refocus the lens, or does the focus length not move?
Think I might be getting the tools out of the shed this weekend!
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Nice tip, but unless you want all of your photos to come out blurry, you’ll need to head to freestyle photo and purchase the diopter meant for the original Holgaroid
my holga takes batteries for a flash. will i not be able to use batteries in it any more if I hack it?
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Great mod!
I have a few questions:
1. What type of Holga is best for the mod? 120 or 135?
120 Got a different back than the 135BC for example.
2. Do you still take pictures with the lens and shutter like an unmodded camera?
I have seen some mods where you expose the pictures by removing the lens cap and it seems horribly wrong for this type of camera.
3. How large pictures do you get and how much of the polaroid frame is blank or black?