HOLGA60mm f/8 Lens for Canon DSLR (Black)

This lens is great for the price. The Holga 60mm lens is designed to mimic the vignetting and the general feel of a vintage, inexpensive 120 film camera using your DSLR. The lens is built cheaply on purpose, but works exactly as intended. Some customer reviews mentioned loose fitting, but the lens I received fit perfectly. One thing to keep in mind is that this is a completely manual lens; you'll need to adjust the focus, ISO, and shutter speed manually as you go. You don't necessarily need to be a pro to get the most out if this lens, but you'll definitely have more fun with it if you're not afraid to switch your camera from "auto" to "manual". I definitely recommend trying it out.

I got this lens for my digital Canon Rebel EOS T7 because I missed taking photos with my holga film camera. Of course it’s not the same experience as using film, but it definitely gives you the same fun experience of experimentation. It takes some trial and error to get the right settings for different lighting but that’s the fun part right? The photos have rich colors and a moodiness that you can only achieve with a cheap pinhole lens. So incredibly fun, I love it and can’t believe how cheap it was.

This lens is not bad if you know what you're buying. As many have stated before, it's a plastic lens that yields a toy-like quality of image. While it might seem to be a waste of technology to use a lens like this on a modern DSLR, read on - this lens has a place in my camera bag for a few reasons.First off, I'll say that the advertised aperture of f/8 is dubious, mainly because I believe this aperture is calculated by measuring the diameter of the array of holes that produce the vignette, not just the center hole. Looking at the back of the lens reveals a daisy-shaped array of holes with a slightly larger one in the center. This is made to generate the dark corners in your photos, and it does a fairly good job on cropped-sensor cameras. However, this lens exposes much closer to f/28 than it does f/8, so a flash or really good lighting is required for all shots.The photos I've taken with this lens have come out with that characteristic Holga soft focus with only the very center of your photo showing any sharpness. This aesthetic is cool and useful under the right circumstances. Still photos turn out nicely, but the main reason I purchased this lens is to use it in video mode. If you have enough light - and that's a big "if", as this lens requires a lot of it - you can get a really neat, dreamy looking video quality out of this lens. Sure, the lens isn't much more than a toy, but the truth is it takes a toy to get this kind of video quality, so it does its job just fine.As an added bonus, if you own a Canon 35mm SLR (like my EOS Rebel T2), you can really nail the Holga look while exerting a higher level of control over your image. So much of the Holga/Lomography aesthetic comes from the film itself, so if you can manually expose your shots through this lens, you get some really cool results.My only gripe with the lens is that it's a little stiff on focusing, but that's pretty much it.

Okay, let's be honest here. From most carriers an iPhone 4 is free with contract, and Instagram is a free download. For your $25, you are giving a fairly expensive camera the ability to take ridiculously bad pictures that a cell phone cam, even on its worst day, can't lowball. But that's why you're considering a Holga lens to begin with, right?This obviously isn't an everyday shooting lens. The fixed aperture is very small, small enough to render the viewfinder almost but not quite useless. The focus mechanism is rudimentary and feels like panning on a cheap tripod. The build quality is... Chinese. And I don't mean "built-to-someone-else's-spec-with-dubious-labor-practices" Chinese; I mean "the stuff you find in the toy aisle at the dollar store" Chinese. "Crap" is the term we are going with here. Even disposables take better pictures than this. It's not so much a prime lens as a "grade D but edible" lens.But again, that's the point. The whole Lomography mentality, slickly marketed as it is, is to make the most out of intentionally substandard equipment. It's a constrained art form, very close to found art and musique concrete in its conception, and if all you want to do is play with it, this is the perfect way to get started. The pictures are obviously a bit fuzzy; the vignetting on an APS-C sensor is pretty soft (although I hear it's actually a little excessive on a full-frame sensor), and the focus capability just isn't that precise. As a video lens, it gives the impression of a dream sequence or a piece of slightly-deteriorated film dubbed onto a cheap VHS cassette. Because of the small aperture, it doesn't do low light well at all; you'll definitely want to use an external flash for any indoor shots. And the markings could be better -- the focus marker and mount guide mark are easily confused.So... after all is said and done, if you know what you're ordering, this lens delivers exactly what you expect from a Holga product. It's not out of the realm of possibility that you might prefer to do this kind of thing in post, which is a reasonably sensible approach, but I find with my personal work that if I don't set up the effects I want to use beforehand, I won't usually get to them later. So if you want to play with the toy camera aesthetic, this is as good a way as any to get into it.

It's nice. It gives your pictures an antique touch. However, it's more like a toy. I wouldn't use it for professional photography.