Lomography

Everybody Loves the Fisheye!
written by larslau on January 2nd, 2009 , 2 comments (5 votes)

The fisheye is my first camera ever – and I loved it. But after taking more than a hundred shots I realised that it wasn’t the most versatile camera in the world. I thought that one could take the fisheye concept further – modify it in some way and still have the absurdity of a camera which can only take fisheye pics. At first I wanted to make a medium format fisheye – I tried to modify a Holga to have a designated fisheye lens, but it was rather hard to get the lens in focus. Then I tried to adjust the aperture and shutter speed of the fisheye which gave some very funky pictures.

But all of my attempts ended up giving results that weren’t what I had expected.

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There was a point when I just thought “why not just remove the glass (plastic) with the lens I’ve removed off from it and see if I can combine them to give a nice effect,” so I did. The lenses was surprisingly small and I started just tapeing them together – before I knew it I had a tiny fisheye lens to carry around in my pocket that I can use with any camera.

For this DIY fisheye modification you need:

• A small metal saw
• A pair of pinchers
• Electric tape

Once you have all your materials – this is what you need to do:

1. Carefully cut off the lens of the fisheye, take out the lens elements (4 of them) and the plastic ring separating the two front lenses.

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2. Now for the back lens you can just throw it away. We’re interested in the three front lenses

Place them (with the plastic ring) in the right order and tape them together. That should give you a tiny fisheye lens.

Now you have a small fisheye lens you can put in front of every camera lens to give a nice fisheye effect. I used mine on Fuji Cheki and the LC-A and if you have an SLR with a huge lens which this lens can’t fit, you can just place it at the side of the lens giving a nice two-in-one pic.

Also, I hacked another Fisheye lens but this time I didn’t take out the glass elements, instead detached the whole Fisheye lens barrel so in this way it should fit my Holga.

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Here is a selection of my best shots taken with this modification!

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Coming Soon

Modifications, techniques and experiments all in one place is a dream come true for the die-hard DIY Lomographers out there. All past, present and future experiments to Lomography experiments will be archived in this one place easily accessible to you, Lab Rats as well. This includes camera & accessories & films alike. Stay tuned for more to come!