it might sound a little bit anachronistic to recommend a cheap chinese plastic camera here, but i think it is not. for quite some time, whenever i saw one of those wonderful toy camera images somewhere, my thoughts were: you don't really need a camera as simple as this for getting those results, it's much easier to use the normal camera and do the rest in photoshop. now i think i was wrong. it's true: more or less the result can also be achieved this way, but not the joy while taking the pictures and the experiences you gain while doing so, like having to move around to get the right picture instead of playing with the zoom or like having to guess the distance or the light of the situation instead of blindly trusting the electronics in any modern camera. the holga only has one fixed shutter speed (which varies somewhat between different copies of the camera), only one fixed aperture (don't be fooled by the sun/cloud switch which pretends something different - it does not work) and the plastic lens has only one relatively wide focal lenght. the film required is 120 medium format film and it should have a wide exposire latitude - ilford xp2 super 400 black and white film is a very good start. a possible way to get your hands on your own holga is to get it via ebay directly from hong kong (from my own
experiences i can recommend to buy from
xinhaicc). did i say, that you can make wonderful pictures with this camera?