Kitty Cookie ~ Testing a Hellios Lens

Hello all! Today I bring you the results of my experiments with a weird little Russian lens from the... eh, late '60s, I believe? It is a Hellios 53mm f1.8, and I have it with an old Contax adapter. I'll talk a bit more about the lens down the cut. For now--low and behold the current Queen of the Bokeh, Hellios 45th, ha!

In any case, it turns out that this little lens (wait, and you'll see the minuscule lens under the cut) may be an anamorphic lens, which is a type I have been chasing for years on eBay.

Manual prime lenses (those that don't zoom in) have generally two rings: one for focusing, one for the aperture. It turns out this lens only has one ring--the aperture. That means that the focusing ring is actually on the adapter itself! Imagine it this way--to focus the lens, I end up literally screwing and unscrewing the lens from the mount. Apparently, the old Contax mount had the focusing ring on the camera, so the adapters that are here and there are actually taken from old Contax cameras, instead of actually re-made (as Minolta or Pentax adapters are).

Do you want to see the mighty lens? Don't laugh, please.

It is a weird little thing, but it makes some stunning bokeh. It has some sort of hazy-feeling (again, it's not real haze; the lens is clean), but I think it is what gives this lens so much character. The blurry depths are always creamy and melt together, and it feels kind of ethereal to me. A good lens for doll photography!

There are others with no bokeh, but I *love* how much it blurs both on the front and the back! In any case, you can see in some of the photos (especially the second-from-top from the batch above) that this lens kind-of sort-of makes a very light fishbowl effect. It's not really bowling, because even when I put the filter in Lightroom to remove bowling and vignetting, there was not much. Surprinsingly, this lens doesn't have much chromatic aberration, even when I was pointing it straight into the source of light (like in the V-shaped trunk, also above).

Do you want to know the funniest thing? I got this lens "for free" when I purchased the adapter! I wanted the adapter for my well-loved Jupiter-9, which I have featured plenty on the blog... and it turns out that the mount was sold with this little Hellios for free--of course I snapped it (and with grabby hands, I may add). Turns out it is an exquisite lens.