Okay, so I have played around with my $14 Holga lens on my D800, and just like the original Holga, you can never really tell what you have until you have it. The original Holga is locked in at f8, and this one was advertised as just that, but it was not. Looking through the viewfinder was extremely difficult on bright sunny days, so much that I longed for the Holga finder just to compose an image. I have a simulated image of what I see through the viewfinder:
Really hard to compose an image with this view.
This was problem number one. Could not see anything, so composing was frustrating. Then I discovered another issue, in the final shots. A vignette was on every image. Now the Holga is a 120 medium format film camera, and a 60mm lens should not produce a vignette on a smaller image size. 135mm image should have no vignette. After digging around on the internet I found that they added an artificial vignette plate to the lens to simulate the “Holga look”. This became very apparent with lens flare in another image:
yuck!
On the same website I found out that there was also a stop down ring added to bring the f8 to f25 causing the darkness (probably to add sharpness to a crummy lens). These things were making a quirky lens pretty difficult to use, so I decided to remove them.
f25 stop down ring, and vignette dither ring removed from lens.
So now after some basic lens surgery, my lens is now back to the f8 aperture, and focus is more difficult to achieve, but it is the closest thing to an actual Holga. Stay tuned for images from this modification. Hopefully it will be fun to use now….