Tintinburgh | experiments | Helios

📷 Helios 44M-4 58/2. M42

I have bought my Fuji camera about two years ago. I have always been shooting with original Fuji lens, first the 16-50mm zoom lens and then 23mm prime lens.

Recently I was thinking about buying lens that I could use as a portrait lens, that is something in the range of 90mm fullframe. There is plenty of Fuji lenses that I could have used but they are in the price range of 500-1000 GBP... And I did not feel like buying a lens for this much money cause I don't shoot that many portraits anyway.

So I looked into different directions and discovered that there is a whole world of cheap vintage lenses! The cheapest and most common on ebay is Helios. Basically it's and old soviet copy of Carl Zeiss lens. And its dirty cheap - as cheap as $50... I bought it for two reasons - the price and because it will increase my hipster points massively 🧔🧔🧔.

🖕 Manual focus only

There is no auto-focus - because there is no motors inside the lens. On the old DSLRs this is a bit of a problem - you have to manually focus the lens according to what you see through the glass and hope that it is focused. But I use mirroless so I can use focus peaking, which is essentially edge detection.

💸 After feels

So far I am very happy with the value for money. In day light or room light the lens is extremely usable. I did not have opportunity to test it fully yet on anybody but myself - and that is awkward as it is manual focus only...

I am definitely going to buy more vintage lenses. I follow articles on Roy Cruz's blog and the next lens is probably gonna be Asahi Pentax (SMC) Takumar 135mm f/3.5, but I will wait until I get back to UK as this one is way cheaper on UK's ebay...