The Dreamy Diana Lens for Your DSLR

For those of you who like the look of the dreamy blurred diana lens but not the cost of film or processing time you might want to give the Diana Lens + Adapter a try!

It's a lovely plastic lens that transforms your beloved hunk of metal and glass into a digital toy camera. You can now get that lovable Lo-fi "technology" on your digi cam from Lomography's series of Diana plastic cameras. Dianas are known for their low saturation, soft surreal blurs, and unpredictable colors.

Simply attach the plastic lens and its adapter directly onto your SLR's body (Nikon or Canon) and shoot away. With one part Diana camera (old school lo-fi plastic) and one part modern DSLR you've got yourself one mighty fine recipe for unconventionally amazing photographs.

Now, I tried to be as hands off as I could in terms of digitally processing any of these images. I wanted you to see what these looked like straight out of the camera just the same way film would be. I did NOTHING with saturation or blurring or vingetting in Photoshop. That is all settings out of the camera.

There is a technique to using this lens. If you like the same leeky light, plasticky, vingettey photos that you get with a film diana you need to do a couple things which then produce great results.

First I created a splitzer. You can buy splitzers for this lens which block out some of the frame of the lens so that you get that cool vingetting effect. But I didn't have one on hand so I just made one of my own. It wasn't hard. I just took a used cardboard box and cut a hole just a little smaller than my lens. To figure out how small the hole needed to be I just used trial and error. I did make a slightly irregular hole since the photos are rectangle instead of square but you could take this as an opportunity to make a square so that your pictures are a square shape instead of rectangle. You'd just have to go back and crop out the extra black space on the edges when you put them on your computer.

Another great add-on would be the fisheye option. You can buy any add-on lens as long as you also buy the correct adapter to fit your camera.

You could also add colored cellophane to make the photo warmer or colder.

A few interesting notes. The first time I put this lens on it felt very loose and I read a lot of other people had the same issue. However, when I looked into it further it's just a matter of really clicking the lens in place. It's not terribly obvious but once it's on properly you shouldn't have any problem with the lens being loose.

Also, when you use this lens, obviously you don't have any control over f/stop. But you do have free range over ISO and shutter speed. So getting just the right light is not a big deal which actually is a plus in comparison to the original plastic film cameras. I will also say that the type of blur is slightly different from the plastic film camera version but as long as your ISO isn't too high it doesn't look grainy.