Lomography Release MFT Mount Experimental Lens Kit

Lomography's new product is aimed squarely at the Micro Four Thirds users; Experimental Lens Kit with built-in mechanical shutters to produce multiple exposures optically.  It's a set of three lenses designed to let you shoot multiple exposures

The developer over at Lomography bill themselves as the "home of creative analogue photography and cameras", but they're finally ready to transition into the digital world. The company's core of film-centric customers are up in arms at the news, as you'll see in the comments alongside the official announcement of the Lomography Experimental Lens Kit, but digital photographers looking for a more tactile experience that gets them out of the digital darkroom (and their camera's menu system) may find it rather appealing.

Three lenses are included: a 12mm prime, a 24mm prime, and a 160-degree fisheye. Each has a fixed f/8 aperture, and includes both a shutter and a filter slot built into the lens.

Other companies such as Fujifilm have released cameras that recreate the effect in software, but the Lomography lenses actually have built-in mechanical shutters to produce multiple exposures optically.

You may be wondering why you need a built-in shutter, given that your camera already has one, but this comes into its own with what Lomography claims to be a world's first feature -- "real, optical multiple exposures on a digital camera".

That might not seem to make a lot of sense -- plenty of digital cameras can already create multiple-exposure shots in-camera, after all -- but essentially, what they mean is that you can open and close the lens' shutter multiple times during a single exposure from the camera body. Simply set the camera in bulb mode (or with a slow enough shutter speed), and effectively, what's a single exposure as far as the camera is concerned is effectively a lo-fi multiple exposure shot.

All three lenses have a shutter speed of 1/100, and a bulb mode; they also come with colored gels that you can insert into a handy slot for filter effects. You won't be getting the best conventional image quality from these lenses, of course, but at $89 for the set it could be a fun way to start a Micro Four Thirds collection after picking up that new Panasonic GM1.