As you may or may not know, Tito Ferradans is a tireless lens enthusiast and the author of the Anamorphic Cookbook Course on MZed. He recently wrote a starter guide on how to pick up a vintage lens from the Soviet era, condensing almost a decade of hard-earned knowledge into an easily accessible resource. So without further ado, let’s give him the floor. Guest Post by Tito Ferradans. We can all agree vintage lenses have something special about them. Be it the fact that they’re no longer made, what age has done to the glass, or how optics were calculated back in the day. Either way, the results are unique. The train has left the station! Big-time cinematographers choose exquisite and unorthodox optics for their Hollywood projects – Greg Fraiser in Batman, or Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. Rehousing companies drain the market of rare lenses and drive the prices up by revamping the simplistic mechanics these lenses originally featured, compared to the sturdiness and standards required to survive a film set. Rubin 1 lens. Image credit: Tito Ferradans Why do I want soviet glass? A lot has been said about Canon FD, Leica R, Nikon AI, and so on… But outside of these more popular options, one lens stands above them all: the Helios 44. Besides being the #1 recommended vintage lens for folks starting out in the all-manual world, the Helios 44 doesn’t belong to any of the more popular and established brands. The Helios 44 is...
Published By: CineD - Thursday, 2 March, 2023