Holga HL-N Lens – Fun piece of kit. Lomo, the digital way!

January 14, 2020

Holga HL-N Lens – Fun piece of kit. Lomo, the digital way!

This is a cheap toy lens to give cheap toy photos – it is not marketed or intended as anything else. Due to the construction the photos can be vey dark and a little difficult to use the viewfinder. There are instructions on the web how to modify the lens too.

Holga and the whole lomo look is pretty fashionable at the moment, and while they’re fun to use, film can put some people off from using them since it is more difficult to get them developed. This attachment for your dslr gives you the easy option of making these images, and have as many as your memory card can handle. So first things first – this *does* work with a nikon d3100, so don’t worry about it not being compatible with your exact camera. It works with anything with a nikon fitting, so should be fine with anything you will be using. The thing to realise is that this is an entirely manual lens, and so you have to treat it as such. Once it’s on your camera, it’s an f8 lens (roughly. I’ve had a bit of an experiment, and using iso settings of 200 on a d5100 i find that 1/100s in good light or 1/40s in poor light gives good results. These are close to holga settings anyway, so perhaps not too much of a surprise. Focussing is a bit haphazard much as it is on a conventional holga, so essentially you can just leave it on landscape and it’ll make almost no difference with your photography.

This lens is compatible with my nikon d3100, but it can only be used when you have the camera set to manual. Be aware that the aperture setting cannot be changed. To get the most out of the lens, it’s best used in bright daylight – i got different results from changing the iso setting. Nice cheap way to create some quirky images – you can also have a play around with the images you create in photoshop, etc to brighten them up a tad, etc.

First, this is a non-cpu lens, so you have to set your camera to manual in order to use it. Since it’s fixed aperture (f/8), the view in the viewfinder is quite dark, and you have no autofocus either of course, just four settings represented by icons, 1 person = 0. 7m, 3 people = 2m, 7 people = 6m, and a mountain for 10 meters. Picture quality is as expected; strong vignetting, very soft (to a degree that focus matters little), and rather dull colours.

As already mentioned it is hard to see through your cameras viewfinder unless the ambient light is extremely bright. The results so far have been a bit of a hit and miss affair more due to my guessing shutterspeed settings(this is the only setting along with iso that you can alter) and unavailibity of my lightmeter than any fault with the lens itself. The resulting images are very pleasing and with some more practice i am sure will be even better.

Love this lens, definitely going to become one of my most used lenses, not had a chance to try it outdoors yet but produces amazing images using the lighting from my window.

I’ve read quite some reviews that complain this lens doesn’t work. It does work, it’s just very basic and it will only ever work if you put your camera in manual modei just wanted to try it out, and it is indeed quite difficult to take any nice pictures. It is simply so dark that it’s very difficult to actually find anything. Live-view mode will help you out on this if you can increase the brightness of your screendon’t expect to take great pictures with this, but that’s not the point anyway. It’s so you focus on getting an interesting shot, without getting all the details right. Build quality is simply very cheep, but it will do for those few times i will actually be using this.

This is a great piece of kit if you want to achieve lomography/vintage style pinhole photography. As it was so cheap, i was willing to gamble on it’s actual value, but it holds up. Don’t get me wrong, it’s basic, but if the alternative is either using instagram filters or paying through the nose for developing 35mm from a vintage camera, then i’m happy. It only works with a high iso and in bright light and you won’t be able to change the f-stop (on my nikon 3100 at least).

Its ok ,this was ok for a cheap experiment, dont use it that often only ay special times me and my friends call ‘holga days’.

Here are the specifications for the Holga HL-N Lens: