Finding Fall + Mini Helios 44-2 Lens Review
The past year or so I've really enjoyed shooting film, especially for landscapes. I'm not entirely sure what it is about film, whether it's the slowing down and enjoying the process (too cliche?), or just the fact that the cameras look way cooler ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). Definitely one of my favorite parts is the unique look, whether it's the soft muted Fuji 400H, the eye popping Velvia 50, or the smooth natural grain of Ilford 3200. However, especially for my portraits, I feel like my photos never turn out quite how I want. Oftentimes they're underexposed, out of focus, or just plain awkward, and as a result they tend to lack that signature film look (the good kind, at least).
But thankfully I have a wife who's willing to put on her model hat and help me practice! The other morning we drove up to the park by the local rose garden to try out some portraits. I used a 50(ish)mm lens on both my digital and film camera, and used the digital camera to test out composition and exposure before taking the same shot with the film camera.
Below are some of the digital test shots. (Apologies if all the film talk above got you hyped up for some film shots!) I haven't sent the film in to the lab yet, but I'll make sure to do a blog post with the results when I get them :)
Also, if you're curious about the lens I used (an old Helios 44-2), I put some thoughts about it down below the photos.
Some Thoughts About The Lens / Mini Review
I thought it would be fun to write some of my thoughts about the Helios 44-2 lens I used, since it's a somewhat obscure old Russian lens, and I remember not being able to find too many good resources when I was originally looking into buying it.
When we went out the other day, I intended to bring my nifty 50mm f1.8 to match focal lengths with the lens on my film camera, but I couldn't find it. So I decided to use my Helios 44-2 58mm f2 with a Canon EF adapter. This was actually the first lens I ever purchased, but this was only my second time using it.
If you've never heard of this lens, there are essentially two reasons to buy it: the swirly bokeh, and it's dirt cheap (I got mine off eBay for around $30). There are also a few reasons not to buy it.
First some of the cons:
Crazy flaring. Like, not the good kind, just the kind that can turn your photo of a pretty tree into a polar bear in a snow storm that's also somehow slightly on fire, which makes it a bit tough to shoot on a sunny day. You can see this to a small extent on the second photo. To be fair, I don't have a lens hood, which probably would have helped. This may also vary from lens to lens (it sounds like quality control in those old Soviet camera factories was somewhat lacking).
Extreme softness around high contrast areas. You can see this especially in the first photo of Jessica holding the leaf in front of her face, where the sun hits the top of her hands. At first I thought it was chromatic aberration, but after zooming in, it just looks like softness. Caveat: all of these shots were taken wide open, so I assume this would be much better stopped down.
Not really too big of a deal, but the lens is a little confusing at first. There's several rings, including the usual focusing and aperture rings, but there's also a third one that's used to set the maximum aperture. For instance, if you set this ring to f5.6, you can't go below an aperture of 5.6. I wish I could explain it better, but I haven't really played with this too much yet.
Not the lens' fault at all, but it can be tough to focus when used on a DSLR, since it's manual focus and there's no split focus mechanism in the viewfinder. Essentially you just turn it until it looks like your subject's eye is sharp. If you have one of them newfangled mirrorless cameras, you can probably use focus peaking so this wouldn't be a big deal at all.
And now the pros!
As I mentioned before, the main reason this lens is on people's radars is because of that crazy swirly bokeh. You may not notice it too much if you're just using the lens around the house or on an overcast day, but it was definitely on full display when shooting into backlit trees on a sunny day. Totally lives up to the hype.
Cheap :)
The lens itself looks pretty cool. Like a piece that fell off of the (Russian bootleg version of the) Terminator. Some versions even have "Made in USSR" engraved into the metal!
When you get focus right in non-contrasty areas, it's actually pretty sharp, even wide open!
Flare. I know I mentioned this in the cons section, but in some of my photos I could also start to see some cool, controlled, unique flare. Unfortunately I don't have any good usable examples of this, but I plan on practicing getting this in the future.
All in all, this lens is certainly worth checking out if you're at all interested, especially if you're looking for a cheap entry into the world of manual focus lenses. Of course there are flaws which make it a struggle to use at times, but it feels worth it once you start to get past them. The fact that I picked this lens up as an afterthought and then ended up writing a whole blog post about it afterwards hopefully gives you a sense of how much fun it is to use!
