Not done with film yet…
It’s been great fun playing with film, and I’m not done yet. Last Saturday I spent a couple of hours at the excellent Olafur Eliasson ‘In Real Life’ exhibition at the Tate Modern, and shot a couple of rolls of film walking around the exhibits there. You forget how little you can control the light with film, without an ISO setting to control light sensitivity.
One of the highlights of film is of course waiting for the surprises to come back from the processing shop. So while that’s been going on, I’ve also been getting busy with the wonderful Helios 44 lens on the digital camera.
The Helios 44
Cat
Acquired for a trifle from eBay, these vintage Russian lenses create the craziest bokeh effects and particularly when ramped up to their widest aperture. I also needed to get an adaptor ring for my EF mount camera to make the lens fit on my full frame body, which was about a fiver from Amazon.
Husband
I started playing with this last night and have taken a few test shots. In the picture to the right, you can see the extreme depth of field with the area around the cat relatively focused and everything else swirly. This lens is still relatively popular due to its famous swirly bokeh effects, and you can see why. Though you’d need to be careful with it to avoid the novelty factor wearing off, I can see some great creative applications for the lens - and all for a few quid.
Learnings so far…
It’s only been taken out for a test spin for a night or two, and this is what I have found so far…
Agapanthus
The Helios is a 58mm lens, which makes it a bit of a pain in the neck to focus and especially at the wider apertures when you’re ramping it up to its swirly max. It goes to f2
This also means that you generally need to be a bit closer to your subject, and the crop is naturally tighter
I have found that, compared to a Canon lens at f2, this lens lets in more light - maybe the light meter just doesn’t work as well with a non-EF lens on the mount. I had to adjust a bunch of my test shots in Lightroom and reduce the exposure.
The lens also takes some nice shots without crazy bokeh action - as you can see from the agapanthus image shot on the black background. So although its well known for swirliness, actually the Helios seems to me to be a respectable lens in its own right
It’s nice and neat and compact - making it a fairly portable “novelty” lens - unlike my fisheye friend which takes a bit more carrying about
I’m really looking forward to playing some more with this lens and seeing what it’s capable of doing on a weekend break to Porto. Travel photography with a swirly twist?