#Helios lens flowers skin#
Lack of sharpness hides skin imperfections (when modern sharp lenses may emphasize them). These qualities made it popular for portraits. People love it mostly for its swirly bokeh and low contrast. Helios 44 is extremely popular because of its low price and strong character. But the image you get has some interesting, different look. The vintage lenses don’t have image quality as modern ones, they may have some optical imperfections and are optimized for the film. As soon as you use some sort of non-ordinary equipment – your photos stand out. Well, most of the people shoot with popular cameras and lenses, as a result, the images look similar. I would really appreciate hearing your feedback, it would help to develop this review further. This is my first gear review, and it is about the product I really love using. Instead, I will share my thoughts about the gear and what it can add to your travel photography.
#Helios lens flowers professional#
Professional reviewers have time, resources and the audience for that. It is not a “classic” review about specs and sharpness (etc.). Many of my readers are here because of travel photography, so I decided to start making posts about photo gear. Out of focus areas and Helioses famous swirly bokeh.I love the fact that my new combo allowed me to discover and take advantage of such tiny jewels, opening new horizons to my photographic activity. But this is part of the fun with macro lenses.Īll the photos in this post, with the exception of the Crocus ligusticus and the Galanthus nivalis, depict tiny and small flowers that were blossoming on an old stone wall, in an area of my home town that is at the border with the countryside, enjoyable but without any particular landscape interest (according to my taste). Not all the photos I've made so far with the Helios have the required precision, also because the slightest wind moves flowers enough to ruin everything. It can be very useful in circumstances in which you want to strongly isolate very small subjects, making them pop out of the background but it also requires lots of patience and practice so that the depth of field is precisely positioned in the right place.
#Helios lens flowers full#
Sony NEX-6 + Zenit Helios 44-2 58mm ƒ/2 58 mm, 1/640 sec ƒ/5.6, ISO 200, focusing helicoidįiore di veronica persica (Veronica persica).Īpart from specific quirks of the lens, high reproduction ratios and full aperture imply an extremely shallow depth of field (a few millimetres). The photo of Crocus ligusticus (an even larger flower) was done a few months ago, before I bought the helicoid, but it could have been made without needing to unmount it. The flowers depicted in this post have sizes ranging from 4-5mm of the Capsella bursa-pastoris to a few centimetres of the Borago officinalis.
With the helicoid, the maximum reproduction ratio of the lens ranges from about 1:5.8 to 1:1.4 (rough experimental measurements). For a few other euros I also bought a M42-mount to E-mount adapter which includes a focusing helicoid, that is an extension mechanism adding the capability of being a variable-length extension tube up to 32mm: it is a quite nice thing on the field, as you don't have to constantly add and remove extension tubes in function of the subject you're dealing with.
So, a few months ago I bought a Zenit Helios 44-2 58mm ƒ/2 a former-USSR copy of the Zeiss Biotar 58/2 with some fame, but a moderate price (I found one for 50€ on eBay, just revised and refreshed, in near mint condition). It must be recalled that applying extension tubes or close-up lenses forces a lens to work off the settings for which its design has been optimised advanced designs tolerate some violence, but old lenses such as the Trioplan are not advanced designs.
The problem is that, being the lens a 100 mm, one would need a rather long extension tube to achieve high reproduction ratios but the practical limit is set at 20-30 mm, where the light fall-off and the degradation of the quality of the image, sharpness included, become evident. In particular, I've found it works well with flowers, because it can enhance their delicate nature.įlowers means that we are near or inside the field of macro: while the Trioplan is not a macro lens by any means, it works well with a short extension tube. After being focused for years on taking photos at the sharpest settings, that lens introduced me to a totally different approach, which of course is suitable only for certain types of subjects. The switch to the mirrorless system raised my interest in legacy lenses in fact, just a few months after I bought the NEX-6 I also picked a Meyer-Optik Görlitz Trioplan, which is famous for its bokeh and ethereal rendition at full aperture.
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