Photographing with a vintage (Helios) lens

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

The fact that spring starts as early as February feels like an extra vitamin pill after a long winter. The snowdrops have barely had time to work their way up through the snow before they are already being pushed aside by the crocuses.

All those purple and yellow flowers in the garden, in the park and on the grass are lovely. You can't help but feel cheerful when you see such a colourful sight.

A great reason to get down lower with your camera.

Crocuses really call out to be photographed in a light and cheerful way. They are very suitable for high-key photography.

You get the best results when the flowers are in the shade and the sun is shining in the background. You then overexpose the flowers by 1 or 2 stops without the background becoming blown-out white.

It is useful to photograph handheld, raising the ISO a little if necessary. When you set the ISO to 200 or 400 together with a wider aperture, you can photograph handheld in bright conditions.

This gives you complete freedom to look for beautiful light through your viewfinder.

The bokeh balls in the background are particularly pleasing, for example. They give the image a festive and dreamy atmosphere.

It is also fun to hold your lens right up against the crocuses, so that you get distortion or a colour haze in the foreground. This lets you create interesting views through the flowers. But they are also beautiful when photographed in a minimalist way!

Depending on your taste, you can either keep everything sharp in the photo, or play with depth of field and the way the light falls. The aim is to look for images that appeal to you and sit somewhere between a record and the abstract.

It often works best to photograph in that order too. The longer you concentrate on a subject, the more you can vary your viewpoints.

I hardly ever use a tripod for this playful way of working anymore. I enjoy holding the camera between the flowers and looking for an image that appeals to me.

This time I chose to photograph with an old Russian lens, the Helios 44. You can buy these second-hand and pick one up for a reasonable price.

The controls are fully manual. There is no autofocus, and you also set the aperture by hand. The camera does show the correct exposure, so that is a useful bonus.

If you are used to photographing fully automatically, this takes some getting used to. However, this way you go back to the (analogue) basics. The difference is that your images are stored digitally.

The Helios 44 is known for its soft, dreamy images. The bokeh is especially popular. You get this by making sure that filtered light falls in the background. For example, sunlight falling between bushes or through the canopy of the trees.

At this time of year, you are best looking for your subject near a bush or something similar. Here, the photo is strongly underexposed and the sun gives it a romantic edge.

Hold your camera as low as possible and point the lens slightly upwards. It then takes some searching to get the balls into your viewfinder or onto your screen. The challenge is to mould the whole thing into a beautiful image.

Something I really enjoy doing myself. Every movement of the camera creates a different image. It is wonderful to give your creativity free rein in this way. And if the photos turn out well too, you couldn't be happier.

The Helios is a Russian lens, for which you need an adapter to make it suitable for your camera. The mount on these old lenses is often M42. So you need an M42 to, for example, a Canon mount.

It is a 58mm lens! For macro and close-up photography, it is best to use extension tubes. Either ones that fit your camera or extension tubes with an M42 mount (approx. 10 euros).

If you want more technical background, this article on Tweakers is very enlightening because it explains the symbols on the front of the lenses. This way, you know exactly what to look for.

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