Well I went out one afternoon and did some very simple tests with my Holga lens on my Nikon D800 DSLR. It was fun, a new exploration. One of the mysteries of shooting with film on a Holga still rings true. The fixed f8 aperture makes it so dark you can barely see viewfinder. Would be nice to have a finder I could mount on the hot shoe, but whatever. It’s a cheap-o plastic lens, what more do you want?
So I made some basic shots just up and down my street using some simple subject matter in bright sunlight.
The original Holga manual (I still have mine) says to use ISO400 film. So I set the ISO to 400. The Holga lens is fixed at f8, and the shutter speed is an estimated 1/100th of a second, so that is where I set mine. Exosure was too hot so I took it down to 1/60th, though I can (and probably will) do a more accurate test of the correct exposure for future images.
The following 3 images are just a basic exposure, with no raw correction. I am not sure what the focus was doing, so I guess I need to do some testing with that as well. Looks like Holga!
One thing I did notice is the vignette-it seems off. Holga used 120 medium format film, a larger image size than my full frame DLSR. I know there is a vignette with all Holga cameras, but I would expect less of it on the 135mm frame. It’s nice, but as a person who likes to make images awesome, I like to add vignette myself. But I guess that is opposite of what this is: junk photography.