The Holga 25mm Lens For Micro Four Thirds Mirrorless Cameras
When I got my first micro four-thirds mirrorless camera, an Olympus Pen E-PL1 with broken image stabilization, it wasn’t to use with ‘real’ lenses but to use with a cheap kit of plastic lenses, the Lomography Experimental Lens Kit. Since then I’ve added several more E-P series cameras to my collection, and now have a whole range of different lenses, including the amazing Panasonic Lumix GF1 camera and it’s now-dedicated 20mm f1.7 lens.
But one lens I’ve always wanted was a Holga, for micro four-thirds. The snag is that these are quite rare nowadays, and no matter how hard I searched, I have never found one. Until now, that is. Of course, it was in the ‘Not Passed’ category of the Kamerastore website, with, ‘flaws that will affect typical use’. But since this was just that the ‘focus mechanism is stiff and difficult to use’, and it was otherwise functional, at 15€ it seemed like a bargain.
The Holga 25mm lens is a fixed f8 aperture lens with a manual focus. It’s all plastic and has a plastic aperture hole surrounded by a halo of even smaller holes. I think that this is to give the images the ‘Holga look’ with an obvious vignette. Fitting the lens to the camera is simple enough, and from the front the Olympus looks just like a slightly posh Holga. The camera is best used in aperture priority mode, and like its film equivalent the lens is quite light hungry, so an ISO of at least 400 is recommended if you want a reasonably fast shutter speed.
I mounted this onto the E-PL2 and headed out on a trip to Aveiro. I wasn’t really too interested in the subject matter, and it definitely shows from the resulting photos. Yes, the focusing is really stiff, but it’s smooth and with a firm twist moves quite well. It certainly seems easier to use than the model featured on a Fotodiox video on YouTube. There are actually a few variations of this lens available. The Fotodiox video featured a Holga lens for Panasonic micro four-thirds cameras (although that one was used on an Olympus), but my model is labelled for use with Olympus Pen micro four-thirds cameras. I don’t really think it makes much of a difference, though.
But what of the images? I think ‘soft’ is the best description. I didn’t really play with different focus distances, just left it on the mountains (which I guess is infinity) and snapped away. I did like most of the images, and the vignette is certainly pronounced. Oddly, this lens seemed to perform much worse than my actual real Holga camera for 120 film, which has hardly any vignette and is a camera I really love. But then again, perhaps quality was the last thing on the minds of the Holga lens developers at the time.
I’m definitely taking the Holga lens for micro four-thirds out again. In fact, we went out to Nazaré a couple of days later and I took my ‘proper’ Olympus mirrorless camera and lenses with me. It turned out that I hardly used them, and I really missed the Holga lens. Next time, maybe.
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