M42 – BeyondPhotoShoot

Shooting outdoor flash portraits with a 50 year old M42 lens on a modern mirrorless body

January 25, 2017John Aldred

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of M42 and other older manual focus lenses. I’ve been using them for years with my DSLRs. They have imperfections, suffered from very random quality control, that give each one a slightly unique look and feel. They often have characteristics that can’t be reproduced with modern “perfect” […]

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Easily build a tilt lens for Sony mirrorless system for less than $65

December 17, 2016Uldis Plinte

Nowadays mirrorless cameras are becoming more and more popular. One thing people adore is its compact size and weight, other, the ability to adapt other system lenses via special adapters. on the technical side, though, 18 mm flange focal distance allows Sony mirrorless system to adopt practically any other system lenses, like Canon EF, EF-S, […]

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Extreme lens modding with the Helios 44-2

November 15, 2016John Aldred

I’m Tito Ferradans and today we’re here to work on a few upgrades to the Helios 44-2 Extreme mod. You probably watched the original video, as it is the most popular one in the channel. After finishing the mod and doing it over and over to fulfill ebay orders, I started to wonder about some […]

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Taking sandpaper to M42 lenses to get that anamorphic look on the cheap

November 9, 2016Tito Ferradans

Tito Ferradans here for a lengthy video involving some serious modding and unique looks. Summer is here and DIY projects are up. A few weeks ago I was blown away by a few photos posted by one Victor Danell with a modified Helios 44. His process was to “polish” the glass elements with a strong […]

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Shooting with a 50+ year old Russian lens on a Sony A7RII

October 28, 2016John Aldred

The Helios 44-2 is one of my favourite old lenses. This, along with the Jupiter-9 are my two most used manual focus lenses for stills and video. The Helios 44 line started in 1958. Its initial design is a copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2, and was produced by KMZ for the M42 mount. […]

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These cheap Soviet lenses are as out of this world as their “Jupiter” name would imply

June 11, 2016John Aldred

Jupiter was a class of lens made by manufacturers of the former Soviet Union. There were quite a few different lenses in the Jupiter lineup, and in this set of videos from Mathieu Stern, we’re going to learn about four of them. A lot of people tend to ignore older lenses, but I picked up a Jupiter-9 85mm […]

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