Lomography and the Digital Camera.

[Chako]

Lomography is a sort of art movement where people take these old/cheap/junky film cameras with plastic lenses and just take photos of everything, breaking plenty of traditional photographic rules. In effect, you don't know what you are going to get until you develop the film. Think of lomography as a counter culture to many of the basic tenants of um...for lack of a better word...traditional photography.

If you want to find out more about this movement...

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/inspiration/what-is-lomography/

Well it didn't take long for products to creep into the digital side of photography. Of course, who would want to turn their nice expensive DSLR into a toy camera wannabe? Well I do for one.

The Lensbaby product l talked about in a previous thread can give you a cheap toy camera effect. In fact, they have a plastic lens add-on that does the job nicely.

Today, I want to talk about and introduce an odd lens produced by Holga. Holga is famous for making very cheap plasticy cameras with terrible lenses. Oddly enough, their terrible quality has garnered the camera a cult following, especially with the lomo crowds. Interestingly enough, they are now marketing a few products for digital cameras. Most notably a line of cheap lenses for your expensive DSLR. This is probably their weirdest offering...

Meet the Holga lens with SLF turret.



Inside the box, you get a very nice Holga kit bag, a cheap plastic lens, two round filter magazines, and instruction sheet.



These lenses are made to fit specific camera brands. Mine is coded HLT-C, the "C" denoting it will fit Canon camera bodies. They make a mount for most camera brands. The center metal ring is a magnet which holds the filter in place. That little hole to the left is the lens.



Here is the backside of one of the filter magazines. Note the metal attachment point. It does allow free movement of the filter ring once on the lens.



Once the lens is seated onto the lens mount, and one of the filter rings attached, this is what your nice looking DSLR will look like. Each filter ring has 9 filters. The 10th is a pass through to use the camera with that lovely faulty plastic lens.





You can't use both together as it won't let enough light through to take a shot. On the plus side, you do get 18 wacky lomo effect filters in a small and convenient package. This looks like a great way to have fun.

Now lets see what these filters can do. First are   some shots taken with a canon lens.





Now with the Holga lens and filters.























The  Holga SLF Turret lens is fixed focus, meaning there is no focus ring. You know it is cheap when there is no focusing going on...but that is the point with something like this. Grab your camera, slap this one, and have fund experimenting with photography.

[dks]

Interesting and fun.
I am allways worried about taking pictures with the effects permanently added.
Personally I would take a normal picture and then use some software to add these effects, so if the original picture turns out to be really good, I will at least have it in a normal form that I can use. With these filters you only have the picture with the effects and not the actual image as it was at the time (what you saw).

[Chako]

True. However, it is somewhat liberating to go back to the old days and use an honest to good trashy filter rather then using a digital darkroom. Got to live on the edge sometimes. 

[dks]

I allways felt like I needed to go back to shooting film at some point, just for the high you get knowing that you only have a limited number of shots, so you need to try harder. However I now have not shot any film in 7 years and I am still not missing it that much. Maybe one day... (Or I can just use a memory card with a 36 picture capacity only  )

[Chako]

Good luck with that. I tried something similar, but failed miserably. There is something liberating with having 1000+ photo capacity on tap.