holgaI received a Holga this week all the way from Hong Kong (thank you “well-known online auction website”). This funny-looking almost entirely plastic camera is loved by many for its temperamental nature and the soft heavily vignetted images that it produces on old-school medium format 120 film.

I don’t currently have any 120 film so I thought I’d pop the Holga lens off and see how my DSLR liked it. There are a number of tutorials out there telling you how to mount the Holga’s lens onto a body cap and turn it into lo-fi lens for your expensive DSLR but since I don’t have the appropriate tools at the moment I decided to just put it on the front of my 50mm prime and see what happened.

What happened, as you probably guessed from the title of this post is that I ended up with a pretty good macro lens. Now let’s not forget that the Holga lens is made of plastic not glass so we’re not going to be getting razor sharp images coming out of it (indeed the poor quality lens is part of the Holga’s appeal) but take a look at the following few test shots and I think you’ll agree that if you want to do a bit of dabbling in macro photography, this is a good value-for-money option to play with top help you decide whether to splash out on a serious macro lens.

holga-macro-pen

There’s no zooming or focussing - you move the whole setup (Holga lens, DSLR, your hands, your head) backwards and forwards until you get the right distance (a few centimetres). Like any macro lens, your depth of field is very shallow so getting the right parts of your subject in focus will usually require a fair amount of patience and a number of attempts.

holga-macro-5p

I found that reversing the Holga lens also gave fairly good macro shots paired with setting the 50mm’s aperture to its maximum and this gave a nice Holga style vignette with fuzzy edges as in these photos of a raspberry and some velcro…

holga-macro-raspberry

This is a much more manageable and portable macro solution than my previous setup of reversing the 50mm in front of a bulky 70-300mm lens. It also has a slightly wider DoF field than that method which is a bit more forgiving.

holga-macro-velcro