I’ve owned this Helios 44M lens for some years now but I think I’ve only shot with it once, a very long time ago.
These lenses were churned out in vast numbers in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, you can generally pick one up at a bargain price.
The 44M is a 58mm f2 lens, becoming an equivalent of 87mm on an APS-C sensor (close enough to 85mm). Naturally, everything is manual and there’s no electronic communication with my camera. The focusing ring is nice and smooth and on this one the aperture ring has positive clicks (I have read that some of them have a smooth, non-clicky aperture ring and I’m guessing that’s a good thing for videographers).
The unique selling point of these lenses is their swirly bokeh effect. You really need to get close to your subject and have the background quite a way off to maximise the effect. Ideally, you’d also use a sensor larger than the APS-C of the Fuji X system. I do have a Canon 6D, and somewhere I think I also have the required M42 adapter, but manual focusing aids on mirrorless bodies make it a doddle to use a lens like this, so that’s what I went with this time.
I went for a wander around my favourite local Victorian Necropolis, Leicester’s Welford Road Cemetery, to try and have a bit of fun with this lens today. I’ll post some of my photos below. The swirly bokeh is only really prominent in a couple of them, but I enjoyed my little photo walk.
My best result in terms of the swirly bokeh effect. The tree in the background was far enough away.Angel statue with vivid green and yellow grasses behind.Angel statue with blurred out grasses in the background, black and white.My favourite angel statue in the cemetery. I always have to take a photo of this one.Just a grabbed snap of a squirrel who seemed to be eyeing up the headphones which somebody had abandoned on the bench.
I had a brief window of opportunity to get out with a camera on Saturday afternoon. Not having a huge amount of time before I needed to be back again I headed a couple of miles north of home to Leicester’s Welford Road Cemetery. This oasis of tranquillity is somewhere I find myself strolling around on a fairly regular basis. It was opened in 1849, is still in use and is (according to the leaflet produced by Leicester City Council) the third oldest municipal cemetery in the country.
I have been taking photos of some of the monuments here for quite a few years now. My favourite by a long way is the angel shown at the top of this post which stands over the grave of one Sarah Ann Palmer Cox (died 1912 aged 52) and her husband John Thomas Cox (died 1920 aged 77). She is sadly now missing her right index finger which was in place when I first started taking her photo but I still find her to be serene, sombre and a wonderful work of art.
I decided that I hadn’t been making much use of my Helios 44M lens so I shot with that for a while. I need to make sure I take it out with me more often, I do love the swirly quality of the bokeh using this lens. I’ve recently switched from using the “focus peak” function of my X-Pro2 to the “digital split image” method for assisting with manual focus. I think the digital split image is more like the focussing systems I grew up using and whether because of this or for some other reason I seem to be finding it’s the more accurate method for me.
I also wanted to try taking some long exposures. I had my Cokin Nuances 10 stop ND filter with me and set up my tripod for a couple of shots. It soon became clear that there wasn’t enough movement in the clouds to make anything particularly interesting but hey, if you don’t try…
Handy mobile app tip : Lee Filters, Stopper Exposure Guide available for free (at time of writing) for Android and IOS.
A 30 second exposure at f11.
At the other end of the spectrum I was also making use of the electronic shutter of the X-Pro2 at times. I was shooting wide open with f2 lenses in bright light and the lowest native ISO setting of the X-Pro2 is 200. The physical shutter fires at up to 1/8000 but there were times I was shooting at 1/10000 or so. I was shooting in aperture priority so I was a little surprised the first time the electronic shutter activated. Totally silent shutter release. I’m more often shooting in very dark locations so I forgot all about having configured this feature.
I know that some people think I’m excessively morbid and can’t understand why I would want to wander around a cemetery with my camera. I’m not morbid, I find that there is an abundance of art on display in an old cemetery like this and history is all around.
(More photos I’ve taken at Welford Road Cemetery over the years can be found in this Flickr album).
Another making use of my Helios 44M.
Using the 55-200mm to reach up to this rather eerie face on an obelisk.
