Digital Holga

Lomography and Toy Cameras are fun cameras to play with, yet most of these cameras use film so you can't see your finished product right away and you might end up spending a bunch on film and processing. The Holga is one of the more popular versions of this camera, and at such a cheap price it's easy to see why people would gravitate towards such a camera.

This instructable will show you how to make a simple holga lens for your digital camera so you can share in the toy camera awesomeness.

UPDATE: After doing some research about to better achieve that "athentic" effect, i found this flickr photo set: Digital Holga With Light Leaks I would like to implement these changes in the future.

UPDATE 2: I have added an extra step to get better pictures

You will need the following:
- A DSLR camera (I'm assuming if you want to do this, you already have one)
- Holga Camera ($30 on amazon)
- Body cap for your DSLR ($1 on ebay)
- Drill w/ 5/16" drill bit
- Screw Driver
- Hot Glue Gun

First step is to open up the holga and locate the screws (See Photo For Screw Locations). Once you find the screws, unscrew them and the first part of the lens will fall off.

There will be two yellow wires, just clip or pull those out to get the lens part off

Next you want to remove the shutter assembly, again there will be 2 screws. unscrew them and the shutter will fall off.

Lastly to free to lens, you want to unscrew it from the square piece.just turn the lens counterclockwise, till you hear a click. It should then screw right off and you have your holga lens.

Next you want to drill the body cap. Try to center it to the best of your ability.

Lastly you want to use a bit of hot glue to glue the lens to the body cap. The lens should line up with the hole for it to work right.

I found that the original placement of the lens was too far away to get good enough pictures so the following pictures show you how to move the lens more forward.

I basically removed the plastic lens from the holga by prying up on the melted points. See the first picture for the points that should be picked at with a screwdriver

Then i hot glued the lens directly to the body cap, then glued on the rest of the holga lens to complete the look.

This method makes taking pictures that are farther away much easier. The last picture is an example.

Now it's time to take it out and try it out. The lens works pretty well, yet the focus point is about 2 feet from me, so it's hard to get good pictures.

It is wonky like a standard toy camera, but this project was pretty easy for the effect. I could see this lens doing well fro portraits, but not so well for landscapes. To operate the camera it has to be in manual mode. I can old control the speed of course.

After getting the lens closer, the pictures seem to be a lot more clear. The next step to this project would be to introduce some vignetting

Hope you enjoyed this instructable!