Adapting a Legend
Modern lenses are getting better and better, with their constantly evolving image stabilization, autofocus, multi-lighting coatings, and more and more lenses. Without a doubt, these lenses are ideal for creating perfect and pristine images, with amazing sharpness, even when zoomed in multiple times. But is perfect always better?
My only problem with modern lenses is (besides the astronomical cost, I mean are they out of pure gold or what), the lack of character. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my new Canon glass, especially the 50 mm 1.8 I use at most of my shoots. It is fast, even sharp wide open, and ideal for low light conditions, but sometimes it feels just…boring. With the added elements, modern lenses don't have any margin for error or flaws, but what if these "flaws" aren't necessarily bad?
Enter the legendary Helios 44-2 58 mm. Named straight after the sun, this Russian should be familiar to anyone shooting analog, especially when you had an old Zenit camera, which came with that lens standard.
This lens was even used by Matt Reeves in the 2022 Batman movie, to film the pivotal car chase scene between the Batman and the Penguin. The action-packed sequence relied on the rehoused Helios because of its compact, lightweight design and its gritty spherical look.
So far I only used this lens on my Zenit camera, but since I upgraded to my Canon 6D, I decided to commit the "sacrilege" to adapt a vintage lens to a modern digital camera.
One of my favorite characteristics of this lens is the famous swirly bokeh it creates around the focus point, similar to some of the German lenses of its time. This shouldn't be a surprise, since the optical circuit is built after the German counterpart, the Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar, 2/58. Compared to the German counterparts, you can pick up one of these bad boys for around 50 Euros, which is a way cheaper alternative compared to modern lenses and a huge advantage of vintage glass.
I am deeply in love with the soft, dreamy look, and rendering of the contrasts and skin tones it produces, while still being (fairly) sharp, even at F 2.0!
Even though I love the manual focus, it is very sensitive, at least in my opinion. Sometimes I think I totally nailed it, and when looking back on the big screen, it seems just slightly off, but this is just nitpicking, practice makes perfect right?
At F4 you already get plenty of sharpness, with the beautiful blur of the out of focus areas!
It truly creates a movie-like look, creating a seamless overlap between the focused and blurry areas, with a bokeh that looks very natural to the eye.
If you really like the analog look or the style of visual aesthetics that high-end German lenses like Leica or Voigtlander produce, I would highly recommend you to adapt an old Helios to a new DSLR or mirrorless camera! Especially since the Helios has an M42 mount, which gives you a wide range of vintage glass to choose from, without breaking the bank. You can even buy an adapter with an integrated chip, so it senses the aperture and point of focus if the adapted lens has an auto mode on it. Hopefully, this review gave you an insight into the adaptation of vintage glass and its pros and cons of it!
