I had a chance encounter with a broken Holga camera during my morning walk. This camera, along with the Diana, had something of a cult following owing to their simple meniscus lens design which made the quality of the images produced pleasantly inconsistent. To quote Wikipedia, the Holga “often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions.” Even if this Holga was fully functional, I doubt that I would have taken it, seeing how expensive film is, and that I no longer have the processing equipment to develop it, let alone make prints from the negatives. The whole movement of using a "toy" camera to create photographic art was given its own name: Lomography.
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Fujifilm XM-FL 24mm f/8: I wanted to experiment with this lomographic effect, so I bought this lens from a dealer in Japan some years back. I paid less than $80.00 for it. I recently found one for sale on eBay for $200.00. I bought the silver version because it was $5.00 less than the black version. Also, it appears to be quite rare on this side of the Pacific because Fuji USA never saw fit to import this novelty lens.
Lenses like this are often called Body Cap lenses due to their ultra compact size. In fact, it's easy to miss the tiny lens opening during a casual observation. It has a fixed aperture setting of F 8.0 and has three different filters setting identified by notches on a rotating filter wheel: Single Notch places a protective filter over the lens to fend off dirt and scratches, Double Notch produces cross stars for some additional sparkle, and Triple Notch provides a soft focus effect.
Today's photos were made with the Single Notch setting, which basically means no special effects. On casual examination, the images are reasonably sharp.
See Trials: My first excursion with the lens was made during a heavily overcast morning, which made the lens' lack of contrast pretty obvious. This image was given the "Smartfix Preset" in post production, which didn't help matters much.
I made no White Balance adjustments to compensate for the cool early morning light. For the most part, these images are Right Out Of Camera (ROOC). I need to pay more attention to my cropping.
The lens has been set so that everything from 1 meter to infinity would be "sorta" in focus.
Since I was working in the dawn's early light, I set my ISO to 3200 to insure a reasonable exposure time. This shot was made at 1/170 of a second.
This was an appropriate photo for a toy lens.
No doubt about the address here.
A car makes a left turn onto Cole Street.
Brewery sign as seen from the parking lot in the Inner Sunset.
Sometimes yellow becomes the new red.
A splendid idea: Spend a day making sidewalk art with chalk.
Here's the date and the time.
Chalk of choice.
Good advice. Image adjusted in post production.
A discarded robe collecting wayward leaves. Image adjusted in post production.
I enjoyed using this "toy" lens. Let's do it again, but with some strong sunlight. It certainly challenges the notion of "sharp" versus "focused" images.
So far, it seems sharp enough for the web.
