If you’re thinking of buying Lomo’s latest plastic-fantastic accessory, the Diana Lens Adapter, which lets you put the company’s range of medium format lenses onto your DSLR, we have one word of advice. Don’t.
The adapter was launched just over a month ago, and at the time I wrote “I’m sold. As soon as the local Lomo store re-opens after today’s holiday, I’m going to pick one up.”
It took a little longer, but I bought one this week for €12, although in the US it costs just $12 (€8) along with a Diana Fisheye lens (around €30). You get a small plastic disk which slots into your Nikon of Canon’s bayonet mount, and onto this clips the lens of your choice. The little widget works fine in this regard, although as it looks just like a body cap with a hole in it, you may wonder where your cash is going.
The real problem comes when you team it up with a lens. Remember crop-factors for lenses? The same works for different film-formats. The Diana is a medium-format camera which shoots on 120 film, which is 6cm wide. Putting the 20mm Diana fisheye onto a 35mm (full frame) DSLR therefore makes the lens “longer”. In practice this means that you don’t get the extreme vignetting and spherical images you’d expect of a fisheye. Of course, if you opt for the longer Diana lenses, like the 110mm, you actually get a much longer focal length. I’m not going to do the math here, as I always get it wrong, but the effect is more than noticeable (feel free to post the numbers in the comments).
What you do get, though, is Lomo’s famous poor-build quality and blurred, distorted images. The shot above is straight out of the camera with no processing, shot on a Nikon D700. Pretty nasty, right? But that’s the point, and the low-contrast fuzziness is easily tweaked in software to make it even worse (or better). The worst part is in fact that the plastic adapter alone can be pressed into service as a very wide-angle pinhole for a DSLR. The problem? It’s stuck fast on the back of the lens. I don’t think there’s any way I can get it off without pocket knife.
And one more thing. The fisheye comes with a clip-on (or hot-shoe mounted) viewfinder. Useless unless you actually put it on a real Diana, but lots of fun for sticking in front of a small compact camera’s lens and shooting through it.
Product page [Lomo]
See Also:
Photo credit: Charlie Sorrel
