New(ish) old gear – Helios-44

A few years ago I was messing around with film photography. I had my grandpa’s old cameras and a Canon I bought at a flea market. A friend gave me a very sturdy Pentax camera he wasn’t using and after shooting a film roll I forgot the camera in a box with my other gear. Well, lately I’m getting back into it all – mostly digital though. And since I’ve been browsing “photography-Tube” I found out about the hype around Helios-44, with its vintage look and circular bokeh. Well, lo and behold the Pentax had a 58mm Helios-44M-2 on. Bought an adapter to use it with my new baby boy, the Fujifilm X-T30 III and… it’s fun, the results are very vintagey – but half of that is the in-camera recipe as well.

I know this isn’t the best Helios out there and it’s half-plastic unlike the earlier ones… And sure, it’s a bit dusty, it’s manual focus only, the crop factor makes the 58mm an 87mm equivalent but… I like it. Not an everyday lens and I have no idea what the results are with a sharp recipe; but it works well if I’m on a slow photo-walk taking atmospheric photos. Here are a few of my favourite results. All SOOC jpegs – compressed from the 15MB originals the Fujifilm spits out.