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5 Lomography Cameras for Retro, Dreamy Photography

These 5 cheap, quirky plastic camera let you take photos old-school style, while pulling off a cool visual trick.

Digital photography has come a long way; it's removed the barrier of expensive film and development, lead to decent smartphone cameras that let anyone to snap a photo anywhere, and it's bumped the resolution up to a ridiculous 59,783 by 24,658-pixel image. At the same time, high-end digital cameras and lenses can get very expensive, and that fact holds back some from experimenting. There are still some groups that still stand by the analog format, and Lomography is perhaps one of the most interesting.

Lomography is an artistic experimental photography movement that revolves around quirky, plastic cameras that still use film. All the cameras take heavily vignetted and saturated pictures for a lo-fi look that makes them comparable to their digital camera counterparts, some of which cost a 100-times more money. Some of these cameras are also designed to do something I've never imagined with my DSLR.

Holga 35mm

There's nothing like a reliable classic. A 35mm was my first film camera and, this is probably the case for anyone who has wound his or her film by hand. The Holga 35mm comes with a plastic 47mm lens (which a good focal distance for any kind of photography), and the minimum aperture limit set at f/8 basically ensures nothing in your shot will be out of focus. The camera also has a decoupled film advance and shutter, which means you can shoot double exposures on the same frame.

Holga 120-3D Stereo Camera

3D photography is still a very expensive niche in the digital space. But the Holga 120-3D Stereo Camera is an inexpensive analog alternative that takes two simultaneous shots with twin lenses. However, you'll need to buy a special slide viewer to see the images in 3D, and the 120mm film is a bit more costly than standard film.

Spinner 360°

Taking a regular panoramic shot usually entails shooting a set of vertical photos while moving your camera around an axis. It takes a decent amount of time to set up, and you don't get any results until you are done with post processing, cropping, and cleaning it up. The Spinner 360° simplifies everything with a ripcord. Just pull and the camera starts spinning to take a full 360-degree image.

Fisheye One

Specialty lenses that provide a particular look to your photos can be really expensive, so a fisheye camera for under $60 is a real bargain. This particular fisheye camera takes photos in an ultra-wide 170 degrees and a near-circular view thanks to the lens's extreme distortion effect.

SuperSampler

A quick-burst shooting mode is one of my favorite things about using a DSLR, but it's a feature that's almost completely absent on affordable point-and-shoots. The SuperSampler is quick-snapper that takes four consecutive exposures on the same frame of film. The four separate lenses take a sequence of four exposures in two-seconds on a single photo.

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Tags consumer electronicsdigital camerasCamerasHolga

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