Home made Holga-esque fixed lens for my Canon EoS XTi

One fine day while browsing through Flickr, I saw a few photos taken by holga toy cameras. Thank god for tagging. The results were impressive. I loved the pictures that come out of those. So I started reading about it and about lomography… So I decided I wanted one! But I don’t have the $$ to spend for one, although for many, 30$ is not too much, for me it is…

The next best thing: Search the internet for DIY’s of the same! I did, and found that many many people have tried this out, only, with a ready holga lens.

Now I was stuck… I have everything else, but a holga lens.

Do the next most logical thing was to search what a holga lens comprised of. So, I found that a holga lens was actually a cheap plastic meniscus lens with a focal length of approx 60 mm.

Meniscus lens: BANG! There was the answer. Wiki displayed what a meniscus lens looked like, and I realised I had one at home! A few months ago on a boring December afternoon, I had taken apart my fish eye lens to see what goes into making it, and so, remembered that that had something resembling a meniscus lens.

So, The first trials with distance et all… But it just wouldn’t work! I had almost given up on it, and decided to work after a few weeks on it again. I realised I was using the wrong lens out of the three in the door viewer fisheye. And I switched over to the other lens… massive leap of faith!

There I was… back to square one! But, now…with a realistically realisable idea… I started believing I could do this without any previously done experiments by others, that I could create an indigenous lens, which, although, might not work like a holga, but could function as an alternate lens which could help me get some wacky and kickass pictures like never taken through my camera before!

Step I:

How I made the BASIC HOLD for the piece of glass that would become the lens:

There is this plastic spacer in the door viewer that had a broad head that takes the bigger lenses of the door viewer. I just chopped it off. Took the glass, and glued many layers of black paper to it to make it snugly fit that head. Viola! I have a meniscus lens setup just waiting to be attached to a piece of mount board.

The initial experiments were tricky ones, just holding the makeshift, half-baked mount in front of the body… an open invitation to a camera sensor’s enemy… DUST! I had to make a mount… otherwise, my camera would give away very soon, and that would spell disaster. So… Step II

STEP II:

MAKING THE MOUNT! :

I took the body cap of my canon which never gets used, and started drilling it in order to get a big hole in it. I would not advice anyone to make a very big hole, the way I did, But I did it consciously to see what really happens if I did. And I always have lots of paper and stuff to cover it with. Having an engineer at home helps… I borrowed my grandfather’s manual driller and other tools and got drilling!

Hence, the big hole in the lens cap. Using power tools would be easier and less taxing physically, because drilling the body cap is hard work. It’s really a tough nut to crack.

So, the next step would be to fix the lens to the Mount… which is best explained with the cross section of the lens.

The only precaution: The lens must be black from inside. You don’t want light bouncing off from within the lens…

The result is not exactly a holga, but a similar fixed lens. The bellow also gives me flexibility to focus on closer objects, and also acts like a lensbaby.

I am a firm believer in ‘FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION’ and hence, the lens might not look good, but works like magic!

The distance between the lens and sensor was arrived at with a few experiments with a bellow, and hence I got the correct distance, and therefore the mount board spacers... You could make the lens a fixed one, without the bellow, but make sure the lens is sealed on the spacer, which ideally should be circular.

At nearest to the sensor, the images appear like

If I zoom in, then it looks like:

FEW FACTS:

This lens cost me practically nothing… all the materials I used were bits and pieces of waste stuff you’d expect an architecture student to have.

That’s the whole point of this lens. Making it as cheap as possible...

In this case, I lost my fisheye lens, but that was not something I made myself, so no worry!

This is not a holga lens. I don’t know what to call it though…

Due to the bellow, it can focus on objects nearer to the cam, but in that case, the blurring of the edges is much more apparent.

So GO ahead and try it out if you want to, and do post in your feedback. Maybe, you’ll come up with something better than my lens! Maybe, a real holga like lens!

And I’d be happy to help if anything is needed.