pomophoto presents... Holga lens converted to Nikon F-mount:

After seeing many cool shots taken with those neat-o Holga plastic cameras, I thought I would like to try it out. But not wanting to mess around with medium format and cheezy plastic cameras with light leaks, I decided to make a Nikon F-mount Holga lens.

Construction is pretty straightforward. Take a Holga camera, remove the lens assembly, use wire cutters, hand file, drill press, dremel, teeth, etc. to remove the threaded focus barrel and lens. Throw everything else away. Get a Nikon body cap and glue the threaded lens barrel to it. Voila!

I was able to talk Randy from holgamods.com into selling me just the lens and the threaded barrel assembly, and so I didn't even have to ruin a good Holga.

Oh wait - I left out the most difficult part... Ideally the distance from the lens to the film plane will be exactly right so that the lens is focussed to infinity when turned all the way in. I did this very unscientifically, by holding the lens up to the camera body and adjusting it so that a distant object was relatively in focus. I say relative because it it quite difficult to tell precise focus looking though the viewfinder at f/8.

Most body caps don't have a little hole to allow them to lock on and require that the lens release button be pushed to remove them. You can drill your own hole though. This makes the lens feel even more professional. I like this so much I even drilled a locking hole on my other body cap.

With a cheap camera, an evening of sawing and gluing, and a bit of luck, you will have a crude plastic single-aperature lens to attach to your sophisticated Nikon. Have fun.

Check out my photoblog: pomophoto.com