sllɐqǝʎǝʎzznɟ

While the doctor might need to melt a hundred Diana cameras to get enough plastic to make me look real good … I hope you don’t get worried by this entry’s title. I am still the same me. 😀

The plastic surgery was meant for my Lensbaby instead. I wasn’t really impressed by the plastic optic kit for my Composer & Muse. Somehow although they claim that it is a plastic lens … it just wasn’t good bad enough. I wanted at least something as lousy as a Diana camera’s plastic lens.

So I knocked out the lens from the plastic optic kit and then planted a Diana F+ lens on it. It wasn’t easy getting the darn lens out of the Lensbaby optic kit. I had to hammer it out (but luckily it wasn’t broken). The next challenge is to figure out how to ‘mount’ the Diana lens on it. After some thinking, I decided that the easiest way was to use a Lensbaby aperture disc and stick the Diana lens on it. Took me a while to try out the different aperture discs and I finally settled for the f5.6 one as it somehow gives better results.

I wasted quite some hours yesterday drinking beer, so I had only very little time to test out the lens. I mounted it on my Olympus E-P1 because I thought I could use the pinhole mode in the art filter feature to get some vignetting and cool colors. Unfortunately due to the 2x crop factor, the Lensbaby doesn’t work very well on it. You don’t get the cool bending effect on it. However, it was still pretty fun because focusing with the Composer was pretty easy. I’ve yet to try it on the Muse though. With this, I can forget about using the adapter from Lomography to use a Diana lens on my DSLR. Well … maybe I could still use it for the Diana F+ wide / fisheye lenses.

These are some test shots I managed to squeeze out on this pretty busy weekend. I shot a few videos with this combo and I think they look pretty cool … but unfortunately I am still unable to open them using Sony Vegas. Duh! Not sure why though. Let me get some rest and figure it out later this week.

I’m very satisfied with this mod but unfortunately this lens will be ‘on loan’ to some friends for some video project soon. Hope I can find time this coming weekend to use it for some photos that I’ve planned to take.