I’m a sucker for how easily they flare, and how the flares look. You can work out which ones pair together well. You can pick up several lenses for a couple of hundred dollars and find the ones you like the most. That they are so affordable allows for great experimentation. What’s most appealing to me about Soviet glass is how you can get wildly different copies of the same lens – to this day, I still have three different Helios 44 that I use for different visual styles. If you have a quarrel with the latest and greatest top-performing autofocus lenses on the market if you find Zeiss optics too sharp, or Samyang too clean, or even the Canon L series a little boring, then you probably already started going down the vintage lenses rabbit hole. It sounds like a bad thing at first, but then, dealing with limitations is one of the best ways to push your creativity and inspire new ideas, isn’t it? Result from a modified Helios 44-2. And unlike a lot of other brands, where you can adapt the lens to your style, I’d say here you have to adapt your style to the lenses. You can easily tell that from the Helios 44. Soviet lenses have a very strong personality. How do they remain so cheap to this day, when every other brand of vintage glass has shot up in price? Soviets were a massive technological hub back in the day, competing head-to-head with the US, and developing several award-winning optical designs and lenses. The Helios 44 is a Soviet lens, and I could almost say most people end their exploration of Soviet optics right there. Besides being the #1 recommended vintage lens for folks starting out in the all-manual world, the Helios 44 doesn’t belong to any of the more popular and established brands. Image credit: Tito Ferradans Why do I want soviet glass?Ī lot has been said about Canon FD, Leica R, Nikon AI, and so on… But outside of these more popular options, one lens stands above them all: the Helios 44. Rehousing companies drain the market of rare lenses and drive the prices up by revamping the simplistic mechanics these lenses originally featured, compared to the sturdiness and standards required to survive a film set. The train has left the station!īig-time cinematographers choose exquisite and unorthodox optics for their Hollywood projects – Greg Fraiser in Batman, or Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. Be it the fact that they’re no longer made, what age has done to the glass, or how optics were calculated back in the day. We can all agree vintage lenses have something special about them. So without further ado, let’s give him the floor. He recently wrote a starter guide on how to pick up a vintage lens from the Soviet era, condensing almost a decade of hard-earned knowledge into an easily accessible resource. As you may or may not know, Tito Ferradans is a tireless lens enthusiast and the author of the Anamorphic Cookbook Course on MZed.
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