More Macro Photography With The Holga 25mm Lens For Micro Four-thirds Cameras And A Close-up Filter

More Macro Photography With The Holga 25mm Lens For Micro Four-thirds Cameras And A Close-up Filter. 

A few days ago, I came across a blog post (https://wp.me/p4WLtv-3DY) from Dave's Place about his close-up phoy with a Holga film camera and a +4 close-up filter. Now, I have a Holga lens for my micro four-thirds mirrorless cameras, and I wondered if such an arrangement would work with the Olympus Pen E-PL2 with the plastic Holga lens and a cheap Jessops +4 close-up filter. 

With the Holga lens set to the portrait setting, the closest focal distance on the plastic lens, and held about 15cm from the subject, I got a nice close-up result. It wasn't perfect, and it was a bit finicky seeing if the subject was in focus on the LCD screen of the camera, but it worked. I had the camera set to aperture priority mode, and manually set the ISO depending on the conditions. The Holga lens has a fixed aperture of f8, but it also has these circles around the aperture, which I think are intended to give it that lo-fi 'look'. In the close up images, this resulted in some fabulous swirly bokeh, and with the vignetting gave some images that I really loved.

I posted those images in an earlier post for the Lens-Artists Challenge, but since putting the Holga lens onto the Olympus Pen E-PL2 it's basically become a permanent fixture, and I was keen to take it out again. This time I set the shutter speed to 1/125s and left the ISO on auto. I had thought that the camera would set the aperture, completely forgetting that the Holga lens has a fixed aperture. Doh!

Anyhow, the images came out really well. I set the frame ratio to square format, since this seemed to work much better than the normal 4:3 ratio, which I had first tried with my original outing before settling on 1:1 that day, and somehow I seemed to nail the focus most of the time. This lens is never going to to be pin-sharp, and I would never want that, but the dreamlike images that come out of it are a delight. 

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#Holga, #Plastic, #Digital, #MicroFourThirds, #CloseUp, #LoFi,