The old saying goes when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Here's my lemonade for today. On a cloudy rather dreary day I looked for something interesting to shoot. The colours, textures and shapes of this flower patch caught my eye. I loved the contrast of dark and dusty colour between the grey greens of the aloe and the orangy pink of the flower.
I used a vintage Russian Helios 44m-4 lens. They were made between 1958-1992 and display unique properties when adapted to a modern digital camera. The bokeh or out of focus highlights can exhibit a 'swirl' pattern given the right background. I didn't have the background to get this swirl bokeh effect in this shot but at f/2, this little 50mm lens can give stunning results.
I purchased a cheap adapter from K&F Concepts on Ebay (~$25AU) to be able to mount this lens (m42 mount) to my Fujifilm Digital cameras. for this image, I had the lens on my Fujifilm XPro-2.
Being a very old lens made for a completely different camera mount, there is no auto focus or auto aperture control. There is no communication between the lens and camera meaning that I need to manually adjust the aperture and focus to get the shot.
Here's the end result. All in all, I'm very happy with how this turned out.
SETTINGS
Fujifilm XPro-2 | m42 adapter | Helios 44m-4 f/2.0 lens | ISO400 | 1/200sec | f/2.0
