I’ve been getting progressively more consumed with photography since my trip of 2001, where I took nearly one thousand, mostly terrible snapshots, with an Olympus Stylus Epic. Since then I’ve owned several digi-cams, 35mm cameras, including a Lomo, the Pentax K1000, and the medium format toy camera de-jour, the Holga. But I only recently learned the technical basics of photography, thanks to the Nikon D70. I’ve always loved the low-fi aesthetic of junky cameras. Some people don’t understand the lure of the toy cameras with their low resolution, bad metering, light leaks, and aberrant lenses. But it’s precisely that sense of unexpected creativity that makes them so neat.

The problem is that they use film, and film blows for this kind of experimentation, because you might get one good shot out of a 24. Hardly worth it! So I’ve been searching high and low for a digital equivalent of a Lomo (seems like they’d corner a market if they released one) but without much luck. There simply isn’t anything out there.

Then I discovered the lensbaby, a simple lens for digital SLRs that yields a Holga-like image. Brilliant. I put this on my D70 and voila, I’m shooting through some pretty aberrant glass, with awesome selective focus for very interesting swirls and blurs. I couldn’t be happier.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 4:13 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.