So I’m currently pretty obsessed with using old vintage lenses for photography and videography, because they offer so much character over their modern alternatives.

See, modern lenses are perfect. Correctly rendered colours because the glass is engineered to perfection, the image is uniformly sharp, and generally true to real life.

And don’t get me wrong, that’s important for many scientific applications, where an unbiased recording of what you observe is paramount.

However, for creative purposes, modern lenses can be pretty damn boring, because they are so perfect.
Imperfections are what brings a creation to life, what makes it feel organic. And they offer so much potential for creative work.

Many of these old lenses have a very soft image when shot wide open, some even introduce heavy blooming on sharp edges, which gives the image a super dreamy feel.

Others have spherical abberations so strong, they distort the unsharp background to the point that the word swirly bokeh became a thing. Such a great effect to frame a subject, draw attention to it, everything revolves around it style.

But even with these quirks, many old lenses are still capable of shooting tac sharp images when stopped down a bit, and are in no way behind modern lenses in terms of image quality.

My current favourite for pure quality shots is the Pentacon auto 50mm 1.8 multi coating, a prime kit lens that came with several Praktika camera models like the for the time very affordable MTL5B. This model has seen many parts produced under not so great conditions in Cottbus Prison, by political prisoners of the German Democratic Republic.

Since they’re completely manual, you have to go over every setting yourself, which helps tremendously with familiarizing yourself with your camera, the lens itself, and just how photography works in general.

So this, and the fact they’re also so cheap second hand, make them a great choice for not just professional photographers or videographers, but also for beginners who are still learning, and might not have much cash for fancy equipment.

Some of these lenses have made appearances in big movie productions, such as The Batman. That movie sees my favourite lens being used in some scenes, the soviet Helios 44-2 58mm 2.0, alongside some other model from Jupiter. To match the look between the different lens models that were used, the studio even modified their grotesquely expensive anamorphic cinema lenses to be more in line with the Helios.

Fun fact to close it off:
The Helios 44-2 58mm 2.0 is by far one of the most mass-produced lenses ever, being spread over multiple different production facilities and receiving several revisions over the years.