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If you’ve been on Instagram lately, you’ll know it’s full of nothing but adverts.
This is where I saw the Retropia lens, and after being hounded by sponsored posts after sponsored posts, I decided to buy one.
I ordered it for a 60th birthday party, thinking it would match the style of the birthday boy’s era—the yesteryear vintage of 1965 😉.
Sadly, it didn’t turn up in time, so I took it for a spin around London instead.
Retropia Lens Review
According to Retropia, the lens is “Designed with precision and creativity, this innovative mount repurposes disposable camera lenses to deliver the nostalgic feel, tones, and textures of classic film, all while utilizing your digital camera.”
So, it’s a genuine disposable camera lens mounted in something that resembles an Oreo cookie that screws onto the front of your camera.
Could it be any good?
No is the answer to that, but that’s not the intention of the lens.
It’s designed to mirror the aesthetics of film, which it does well in a novel and fun way.
By modern standards, the Retropia is a cheap lens, and I fully expected it to be rubbish and a disappointment.
It is arguably rubbish by professional standards.
However, it’s not a disappointment.
The lens is fun and quite challenging to shoot on.
Retropia Lens Pros
- Novel
- Fun
- Small
- Light
& Cons
- Expensive (there are cheaper alternatives)
- No soft case, lens cap or cover
Build & Handling
I love the look of the Retropia.
It has a very clever design, and what drew me in was the intrigue of a lens that looked like an Oreo cookie.
There’s even the Oreo cream filling that adds to the playful design of the lens.
The lens is made entirely of plastic, including the body of the lens and the element.
Sadly, the lens lacks any form of protection.
Although the lens element doesn’t protrude from the front of the lens, which provides some minor shelter for the element, and despite the optics being designed to be imperfect, it would be a shame to damage it when it’s not on your camera.
There’s no locking mechanism either; it simply twists on and off your camera body, but I’d say it doesn’t need such a mechanism.
It’s quite a snug fit and unlikely to come off.
The Retropa is a great travel companion, too.
And given I’m a huge fan of travelling light and minimalistic travel photography gear, this fits right in because it weighs a mere 16g (without the rear lens cap).
There are alternatives to the Retropia lens, which look identical (and are probably manufactured in the same factory!), so I’d suggest you pick one of those, given that they are considerably cheaper.
You’ll find one for less than £10 on AliExpress, including delivery.
Optics
The lens is 32mm with a fixed f/11 aperture.
If you shoot on a cropped sensor, like my Fujifilm X-T5, you get a narrower angle of view and something more like the Fujifilm 33mm f/1.4, which will look more like a 50mm full-frame lens.
My biggest stumbling blocks are the minimum focusing distance (around 1.5m) and the aperture (which is disgustingly small!).
I like details, so using a shallow depth of field and close focusing distance makes it easy to isolate details (and subjects) to create interesting pictures.
With the Retropia, the minimum focusing distance means you can’t get up close and personal with small subjects, and almost everything is in focus all the time, like something taken on a mobile phone.
Of course, you could consider this an issue with the lens, but it’s not, given its origin–a disposable film camera lens whose intended use was happy snaps with the family at birthday gatherings or holiday pics.
Instead, it presents a challenge, where you have to work a little harder to get better pictures.
The difficulties shooting with this lens are the elements that have made it fun, and I have to look at things differently to get some reasonable imagery from it.
The optics are as terrible as you might imagine, partly because the lens is plastic, and partly because film camera lenses and digital sensors don’t marry together very well.
However, the chromatic aberrations and halations bring the imagery from this lens to life by creating that instant film look and soft blur, which is why you would buy the lens.
Specs
- Focal Length: 32mm (equivalent to 49mm if shooting on APS-C)
- Aperture: f/11
- Weight (approx): 16g (without rear lens cap)
- Material: plastic
- Lens construction: one repurposed disposable film camera lens element
- Focus range: 1.5m – ∞ (fixed focus)
- Full details on Retro-pia.com
How to Get the Most Out of the Lens
1 | Set the White Balance
For a while now, I’ve shot on manual white balance (WB).
After spending time shooting a multicamera film with a videographer, I switched from auto WB.
It was all about the edit.
Shooting on the same preset daylight white allowed us to match colours in the edit straight out of the camera.
It made for a consistent, easier edit, meaning we didn’t have to chase the colours between cameras.
So, I applied the same process to my stills, which I now set at 5500 Kelvin to give me a daylight-balanced baseline to start the edit.
It provides consistency and more predictable editing, speeds up workflow, and preserves natural colour casts, such as the blue and golden hours.
After all, your camera tries to make whites appear white, no matter what light illuminates them.
I shoot in compressed raw, too, so adjusting the white balance in post-processing is there for the taking.
And if you shoot in JPEG, the consistency of a fixed WB is a much better starting point for editing multiple images than auto WB.
2 | Turn off Focus Assist
My Fujifilm X-T5 has focus assist turned on as standard when a manual-focus lens is fitted, which is what the X-T5 thinks the Retropia is.
I found seeing the focus peaking highlights distracting, so I turned them off, along with the manual focus distance indicator, which was also distracting and useless.
3 | Embrace the Noise
The lens is set at f/11, which only a madman would shoot on in normal circumstances.
This means you will get some noisy imagery when the ISO is starting to be pushed in lower lighting conditions.
Embrace it–it’s all part of the film simulation aesthetics.
4 | Edit the Imagery
Aside from the fun shooting on this lens, the most significant selling point is the film-style effect it produces.
The files need a bit of a tweak to get the most out of the lens and to induce that film look.
Kodak Gold, which I shoot on my film cameras (like my Canon AV-1, Bronica ETRSi and Nikon F2), has a nostalgic feel.
The tones are warm and familiar, with a soft contrast curve that I love, so I tend to edit my images in a style sympathetic to the look and feel of Kodak Gold.
Retropia Lens Imagery
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