I know its not a Nikon DSLR 🙂 but its coming up to Xmas and could make an interesting pressie.

Opinions? partakers? Recommendations?

Holga lomo cameras seem popular

I have a Horizon 101 pano camera that is great fun

i also have a peleng 8mm fisheye for my D300 but i guess that doesn't count

to be honest after the novelty wore off i pretty much stopped using the lomo stuff.

tbh Lomo stuff is probably out of the question due to expense.

Agree with the above that the novelty can rub off fairly quickly.

However it's nice to own one, and bring it out for trips away etc. I got given a Holga 3-4 years ago and it always travels with me on trips and takes photos like below..

This is where it's at for lo-fi-digi-cam action:

A first look at the Yashica EZ F521

that yashica looks nice. have you seen the harinezumi cameras?

Wow! I love this:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/03/16/superheadz-plamodel.html#previouspost
DIY airfix style camera!

That's one of the things I like about the iPhone camera; it's about the equivalent to a Kodak Instamatic, which is fine, people have used cameras like that for snapshots since photography first became commercial, but there's a couple of apps that give you things like Polaroid, Lomo, Helga, 60's style, B+W, which are fun to play with, without the expense of a camera a film processing.

I agree that its could that photography is more accesible now due to things like the iphone etc and thats a good thing, but the processing of film and using a 'proper' camera, is kinda what makes it special…or at least for me anyway!

but the processing of film and using a 'proper' camera, is kinda what makes it special

ie making a fetish of a technological limitation 🙂

On this occasion I totally agree with SfB. I pretty much stopped taking photographs because I just couldn't afford the processing costs, and I had absolutely no means for doing it myself. The beauty of digital is that I can now take loads of pictures, and if only a percentage of them are worth keeping, well so what? The cost is effectively zero, memory is unbelievably cheap now, so going to a gig, for example, and shooting a couple of hundred pics is not unusual. How much would the processing cost for that lot, only to find that there are perhaps twenty good ones? I can chuck the rest away, they have no costs involved, and it also means I can play around with various effects on my phone, and if something works, send it straight to Flikr and Facebook direct from the phone. Hopefully the 4G iPhone will up the pixel count again, but the 2Mp of my 3G produces perfectly good snapshots; I had to Photoshop pics from digital cameras for print when they were less than 1Mp, and a big memory card was around 128Mb. The jpeg artifacting had to be seen to be believed, and the first pro Nikon DSLR was only 2Mp. Dammit, my first digital camera, a Coolpix 5200, 5Mp cost me £800 in 2003, and the 1Gb CF card for it cost £200! You can get a 16Gb SDHC for less than £20, now. The costs for someone like me, with relatively limited funds, are so liberating, just being able to snap pics of anything and just play, like with the camera app. Love it to bits.

but the processing of film and using a 'proper' camera, is kinda what makes it special

Lomo is not the singlespeed of the photography world…..
However, the people who do it probably think so

The costs for someone like me, with relatively limited funds, are so liberating

it's quite amusing to hear professional snappers complaining about their livelihoods being threatened by this, as if the old ways were sacrosanct 🙂 Even if a lot of the photos taken casually are rubbish, the potential there to encourage many to become interested and develop their own style

Ah, i meant purely for lomo photography, i always think of it as kinda cheating/defeating its purpose by playing with digital effects in which you have some sort of control over as I always thought the idea of lomo was to wait for the really random photos that you'd get back from boots! See your point though..

Instant gratification isn't cheating.

There are some interesting "toy" cameras from the far-east that seem to capture the charm of the lomo – digitally.

utter naff.

The thing with the app is that you don't really have any control. What you see is what you get, there are no settings. You either take the pic with that app setting, Lomo, Polaroid, Helga, etc, or open an existing pic in that setting, and the result is just as random as using an actual camera, but without the cost and waiting. An example: I was in Bath Sunday, crossing in front of the Royal Crescent. Nice sunny day, nice clouds, so I got out the phone and took a couple of photos of each end, opened them in photostitch, which joined them into a pretty good full panorama of the whole building. Then I sent it to my Facebook page while I was walking into the city. A little while later I had a couple of messages from friends saying 'hey, nice pic!' I mean, how neat is that? Of course it would never stand up against a similar pano taken on my D60, and stitched in Photoshop CS, but I couldn't do that on the move. It's the freedom of technology allowing you to take snapshots quickly that is liberating, but nothing can match a big quality print from a photo taken with care on a top flight DSLR, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My dream is a Nikon D700 and a Leica S1, but with the Leica somewhere around $28000 it'll have to remain a dream.

Here's one I made earlier: