Helios-44-2

I picked up a Helios-44-2 58mm f/2 lens a week or two ago. It’s a lens with an interesting history: when the USSR got their half of Berlin after the end of World War II, they discovered that they were suddenly in possession of a factory that produced Zeiss lenses, one of the masters of the field. [edit: removed some mis-history]

The Helios-44 line is a clone of the Zeiss Biotar lens, and while it’s probably not optically identical, it has the advantage of being one of the most mass-produced of any lens throughout history, which means it’s cheap and plentiful. I got mine for $12 plus shipping, and it came with a (non-functional) Zenit-E camera to boot. Most of the Helios-44 lenses have the common M42 screw-mount, and adapters that allow you to mount these lenses on Canon EOS cameras are pretty cheap.

So I stuck it on my 40D.

It’s a manual lens. This means that you have to set the camera to aperture priority or to full manual mode, and then set the aperture ring on the front of the lens. It’s also a preset lens, which means there’s a second aperture ring that slides the aperture from wide-open to whatever the aperture is set to — this is because the viewfinder darkens as you stop down, so it’s handy to focus wide open, then quickly slide the aperture down before you take the photo. Modern cameras do this for you, but the Helios is not so modern.

I do find that my 40D’s metering is a bit off through this lens. Setting the exposure compensation to +1 helps, and I might try another stop or two higher just to push the histogram further. Focusing is a little tricky and I haven’t mastered it yet. I might pick up the manual focusing viewfinder screen for the 40D, since I do a lot of that anyway, especially with ring USM lenses.

I’ve read that this lens is supposed to be pretty sharp after f/5.8 or so. I’m not really finding that. It could be that my copy is off a bit (quality control on the Soviet lenses was not that consistent), or it could be that people mean it’s relatively sharp compared to other lenses of its era, but I find there’s a subtle softness to it. This doesn’t bother me. I do a lot of plant photography, and for this, it gives some very interesting results.

The color rendition (especially green) is fantastic. Subdued, but saturated. The bokeh, too, is amazing. It’s very smooth and fluid, and the transition from focus to bokeh looks great. It’s certainly different than my Canon lenses, and I quite like it. The lens is infamous for a strange distortion that appears when stopped down a bit: distant bokeh becomes distorted in a swirly, almost fisheye fashion. It’s not displeasing, though it can be surprising or distracting if the photographer doesn’t take it into account while making the image. It’s definitely interesting — a good example is the photo of Japanese maple.

I like this lens a lot. For the money, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s providing some really great images.