My home made lens

I was inspired by Joachim Guanzon's digital EOS holga mod. The guy took apart a Holga lens and mounted it on a drilled out lens cap, and put the assembly on his Canon DSLR. This LINK takes you to his well-documented page on litratista.org.

Not wanting to shell out extra money for the holga lens, I looked around the house for something to use. I was looking for old disposable cameras, and small magnifying lenses. I had an ancient video camera that wasn't working, and the viewfinder lens was already loose. I took off the lens and put it in front of my dslr to see if it can form an image. Surprisingly, it did! i looked carefully and made sure that there was enough clearance between the lens and the mirror. It was tight, but i figured there was enought space. I pressed the shutter and it worked.

The lens donor: my old, non-functioning panasonic video camera

Next, I needed something to mount the lens in front of the camera, so I went with the old favorite, the body cap. I still had the one that came with the camera. I started a hole with the hole puncher of my swiss army knife. Then I enlarged that with the small knife. I was careful not to cut myself and tried to keep the hole round, and in the center of the cap. I managed to make a reasonable hole, i think. I also padded the front of the cap with black duct tape to keep the lens from hitting the mirror. The protrusion inside the body is about the same distance as an EFS lens.

• The hole on the body cap was hand made. Duct tape was put to add more distance between lens and mirror.

Then I put six equaly-spaced dots of epoxy on the back of the lens too keep the lens in place.

Back view: sloppy epoxy job, but it works.

After mounting it on my Canon 350D, its time to take photos! My camera is gaffered up and looks more toy-like than ever before.










the images are not sharp, but i like them. :) The lens has a view of about 50mm (35mm equivalent) and a constant aperture of f/2.0











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