I asked for the Holga lens for my Canons as a gift. I saw them on display at the Photographers' Gallery in SoHo, but with little information, but of course the Internet has lots of (not always correct) information. If you don't know, this is a take on a retro Russian camera with a plastic lens that gives crude slightly retro looking pictures, and whilst it seems that most of the world is looking for fidelity or changes in Photoshop, this does exactly the opposite, with built in vignetting, slightly blurred focus and lens artefacts.
The instructions are slightly misleading, as it tells you to put the Holga lens in your camera, and switch to manual. What is not clear is that the lens is fixed aperture, at F8 I think on a typical digital body, and the only things you can manipulate are shutter speed and ISO. Looking through the viewfinder gives a dim view in all but the brightest light, and it seems that this device should best be operated in bright light, like the good old days of box brownie type cameras.
I chose to shoot in RAW, so that I could manipulate the exposure afterwards, with an ISO of at least 400 and shutter speeds not less than 1/60. I need to play some more but here are some of my first shots taken in my garden at the beginning of Autumn.
This has had some manipulation in RAW to give it a bit more exposure and colour
Here is the same image converted to B and W.
It is all very flat, and looks like the sort of thing that was coming out of home camera's in the early 1950's
Did not like the look of this, so converted it to
And black and white
If you look on the Internet, there are some better examples, but this was a first outing, and will report back with more work. The good news is that it reduces the weight of DSLR. Do a google search on Holga.
