When I first heard about Light Leaks, I was thrilled. Finally a magazine devoted to one of my favorite things: toy cameras! Having fooled around with Holgas and various other plastic cameras for years, I opened up Issue 8: Almost Perfect with great anticipation.

The photography in the magazine is absolutely beautiful and very inspiring. It certainly made me get the old toy cameras out and stock up on medium format film. This issue also has a comparative review of the old Diana camera and the re-make, an article on painting your Holga, a couple of short interviews, mini-profiles of featured photographers, and a few other short articles. Unfortunately, the writing falls a little flat. It’s a very thin magazine, which in itself is not a bad thing (if you take away the many full page ads in most mainstream publications, you are left with very little content anyway), but it did feel like there was too little meat on these bones. I think it would help to have longer, more in-depth and focused content, possibly basing each issue on a theme. It’s not that the writing is bad, it just left me wanting more.

It doesn’t help that the typography looks a little on the home-made side. Serif, sans-serif and “handwritten” fonts are mixed together, margins jump back and forth, and overall it looks like Light Leaks doesn’t have any particular layout style.

Light Leaks is sold for $15 in stores, which is a lot of money for something this small. Publishing magazines is a high-cost business, and I am sure they’d sell it cheaper if they could. But I probably wouldn’t spend that kind of money on a magazine this tiny, no matter how nice the photography was and how much I’d like to support the good cause. The alternative is to subscribe, which does lower the price considerably, but after having read through it, I am just not convinced.

I am very torn by Light Leaks. It feels like it has great potential, the photography really is very good, the paper and print quality is nice and what little content there is, is not lost in advertisement hell. I really wanted to love everything about it, but as it is, I am just not as impressed as I’d hoped to be. I will keep an eye on Light Leaks and flick through it whenever I get the chance (I am lucky enough that they sell it at my local camera store), and I’ll keep hoping it will improve enough for me to start subscribing.

Further Reading: Light Leaks has a website where you can view PDFs of back issues and subscribe.