The Plastic Eye

(click photo to enlarge)

So I got a new lens for my camera. Yeah, I'm a sucker for camera gear. This one's a little different, though. No fancy extra-dispersion aspherical ground glass elements in various groups for this lens. Nope -- pure plastic.

My interest in the Holga was piqued by a few articles I read on the interweb. For the uninitiated, the Holga is an all-plastic toy film camera. It has one shutter speed, one aperture setting, leaks light into its body, and has a junko plastic lens. As a consequence, when compared to photos taken from a "real" camera, the pics from a Holga.. er.. don't look quite right. Which is what we're going for here.

I actually considered picking up a real live Holga, but I really didn't want to deal with film. It's medium format, which would have been interesting to get into, but still -- film. So I did the next best thing: I paid a guy to hack the lens off a Holga and mount it onto a Nikon body cap. So now I can mount it onto my SLR. Sweet, sweet digital goodness.

I was not very enamored by some of my initial experiences with the lens, though. I spent a good amount of time going over every crevice of the thing to get rid of all the plastic shaving bits. Not a very delightful task. And the first few shots I grabbed with it were -- how shall we say -- not inspiring. But I got a few interesting exposures. And after a while, I started to get used to the quirkiness of this particular lens.

The Holga definitely forces you to approach photography differently. It sort of makes you look at the world a little cockeyed, from different angles, trying to find something that would hold interest before sending it through the distorted plastic. The photo above is one of the better examples of its results.

One thing I don't like about Flickr is that they seem to boost contrast and saturation a bit after you upload photos. The above picture was less contrasty than it appears now, and a bit more flat and dull in terms of color. Usually I wouldn't complain, but in this case, it really does take away from some of the eerie, washed-out feel I'd seen before uploading. Oh well. You get what you can from free services.

(click photo to enlarge)

Artsy? Funky? Weird? I don't know. Whatever it is, I think it's right up my alley.