I’ve recently purchased a Holga lens. What is a Holga lens? Think of shooting through something that resembles the bottom of a plastic water bottle. The Holga camera is a toy camera made in China that uses 120 film. Through the creative inventiveness of Randy over at HolgaMods.com, I have a Holga lens which actually attaches to my digital Canon EOS.

Shooting with a Holga on my DSLR isn’t the same as with 120 film, but it does open up the world of more creative photography in what is such a clean and sterile digital environment.

The Holga lens is far less than perfect in it’s materials and results. Let’s talk optics. It’d be a short conversation. Just a plastic lens. Let’s talk aperture. Looks to me like about an f/8 or so? It’s about the size of a pencil.

Focusing is done through twisting the lens which is on a screw type thread. Yes, you can screw it off the mount and then you’ve got a great hand held macro lens. Move it a round a bit and it’s a hand help Lens Baby.

I’m looking forward to doing more test shots. For now, I’m more enamored by the idea of a $35 dollar lens in my camera bag keeping company with $1,000 lenses. I hope they all get along just fine.

-Kyle Dreier

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.