Holga HL-C Lens : lens

January 18, 2020

Holga HL-C Lens : lens

Good little lense for the price. Will always be in my bag for when i get bored of my wide angle lense =].

As you will know this lens isn’t for perfect pictures its a fun lens that gives you a new twist on your pictures i quite liked using it on long exposure photography. Perfect if your board as even a boring photo can look much better with this lens.

Once you have put the lens on your dslr, your expensive dslr becomes and takes photo’s on par with a cheap cr*p throwaway camera.

Item arrived safely and in good time a. It works well on my 40d and is a fun lens to experiment with. Very different to a normal lens as it allows so much less light thru, gives pinhole effect. You need to use in good light to get results. Fits easily on to the camera body.

After reading a review of the lens in the digital slr magazine i decided to buy this lens. The quality is cheap but the effect is what i wanted you can view images made by this lens on flickr, if you search for holga hl-c. Delivery of this item took 12 days and was finally delivered by the post office. The only problem i had was finding the tracking page for shipment but this was rectified by a quick email to holga direct thankyou.

I love post processing and i love vintage film photography so after a shoot (even a small one) with my (moderately) expensive gear i spend a hefty amount of time processing the photos, often selecting a few well composed photos to turn into vintage photos. I also love the sort of story told by much older lenses or, even, toy lenses–the emotions they evoke can be very powerful. So, having spent many a wee hour making photos taken on expensive camera gear looking like they were taken on crappy camera gear i thought i should stop mucking around, cut out the middle man and just turn my expensive camera gear into cheap crappy camera gear. Enter the hl-cso, anyone interested in vintage photography will have heard of holga and the gloriously distorted, colour burnt, heavily vignetted moments they capture. Whilst this lens is undoubtedly ‘crappy’ it is perhaps not crappy enoughwhen it arrived i rushed home from work and had 15 minutes or so before the house would fill up. I feverishly jammed it onto my 650d (yes it’s plastic but it feels fine and solid going on the camera), put the shutter and aperture at fairly neutral settings (it wont make a great deal of difference anyway), headed outside on an overcast english early-evening and started snapping. Having read reviews i thought it would struggle in the dim light but it sucked in plenty of light. The 60mm (on a crop sensor camera) is good length for snapping things and the simple-to-understand focussing ring (4 settings–fairly close, portrait, group portrait and mountain) doesn’t do much so there was no real need to worry too much about focussing. Even on a cloudy day it was clear enough in the viewfinder to ‘attempt’ to focus. I did try it indoors and no, dont bother.

Nothing shouts out shabby chic like a thousand quid camera with a plastic hole for a lens. Use on manual for best results. You might even learn how to use a camera properly. Be prepared to ramp up the iso a bit as it doesn’t let a lot of light in. It works ok on crop sensor cameras but is magic on a full frame. Construction is awful but at least you cant go wrong when there’s nothing to go wrong. Order now and have some fun.

Cheap and cheerful and as a child of the 60’s the images remind me of bygone days. Still playing around with it.

Wonderful lens! Gloriously ‘crappy’ results!
Nothing shouts out shabby chic like a thousand quid camera with a plastic hole for
item arrived safely and in good time a