Holga In The Cold: Fun With a Unique Camera

Taking only one camera into winter hills sounds simple until the camera is a plastic Holga with one shutter speed and one aperture. If you shoot film and still want usable negatives when the light swings from predawn to harsh midday, this setup forces decisions you normally avoid.

Coming to you from Steve O'Nions, this cold, practical video follows O'Nions limiting the whole outing to a single Holga after getting tangled up using multiple systems on a prior trip. The first constraint hits immediately: the camera’s lack of exposure control, which pushes you toward film stock choices that can survive bad guesses. O'Nions starts in low light with Ilford Delta 3200, accepting that it may still be underexposed but betting it will hold enough detail to print or scan later. Then something worse shows up than exposure math: the shutter begins to drag, raising the risk that frames turn into blur without you noticing. The way O'Nions handles that moment is the part you should pay attention to if you ever rely on a cheap mechanical camera in the cold.

Once the light rises, O'Nions swaps to Ilford XP2 Super and leans into what the camera does well: soft edges, heavy vignetting, and a kind of glow that would look like a mistake on a modern system. You see why 120 film can feel different from 35 mm even when the lens is mediocre, since the square negatives carry tone in a way that suits rocky ridgelines and bright sky. The video also gets blunt about what slows you down in real weather: winding the film with numb hands, squinting at a tiny red window frame counter, and working with only eight shots per roll. O'Nions compares that to the ease of an autofocus 35mm body on a Peak Design Capture Camera Clip, where you can grab, shoot, and stow without fiddling. The temperature and windchill become a bigger factor than the “toy camera” label.

The most useful section is where O'Nions starts controlling contrast with filters instead of pretending the camera has settings. An orange filter goes on to deepen the sky and bump contrast, but it costs light, so the decision is never “always use orange,” it’s “use it while the sun can pay the bill.” When the light dips behind hills, O'Nions switches to a yellow filter to keep contrast without sacrificing as much exposure, and later removes filters entirely to avoid thin negatives. There’s also a quick but telling warning about flare when the shutter returns, plus a simple workaround that keeps stray light from creeping in during that motion. Check out the video above for the full rundown from O'Nions.