Vintage Vianey

It’s pretty remarkable how advanced the modern camera is. With eye auto focus and autoexposure, we are truly spoiled. It makes taking photos almost a mindless process. Just point and click and the image produced is good enough to share on social media.

But with all these advancements, there tends to be a bit of a detachment from the whole process of photography. It’s gotten to the point where the photographer has to think less and less about the hardware aspects of the photo. You no longer have to focus, make sure exposure is correct, adjust white balance or even adjust aperture depending on what you want in focus. The camera does everything for you, and if you’re on a phone, you don’t even get most of these options.

All the photographer has to focus on now is posing the model and making sure the composition is correct.

Which sounds fantastic. With less work and fewer distractions for the person behind the camera should be a win, right?

For the most part, it is. After taking photos for long time, you begin to get jaded and that sense of detachment begins to kicks in. The less involved you are in the process, the less attachment you have to each photograph. When you can take 10 photos a second, and take 1,000 photos in a shoot, no individual photo feels truly unique. Which is why so many people are starting to use vintage camera gear. From shooting with film to using vintage manual lenses, to even using polaroids, more and more people are looking for ways to make their images look different and somewhat unique.

I have used vintage lenses for some time now. They are fun to use when you’re not in a rush. They slow you down and really make you think before you press down on the shutter button. Taking photos of stationary objects is the easiest, people and moving subjects is where it tends to get tricky.

Knowing all this, I decided I to have a photoshoot and use 2 all manual lenses. Helios lens known for it’s swirly bokeh, and the Canon FD 50mm that used to be a staple for anyone with a camera in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

Vainey was happy to be involved in this little experiment of mine. We agreed on the outfit a week prior, but knew the weather was going to be changing, so we were prepared to go with a different look if needed. The day began fresh with semi cloudy skies, but gradually got colder and cloudier.

So she had 2 jackets that she would switch off depending on the environment.

I explained to her that every shot was going to be a lot slower than what she is used to, so she would have to hold her poses longer until I was able to focus properly. Something she greatly excelled at. She is a natural model. Directing her was a joy. She knew exactly what I wanted for the camera and took the initiative try different things.

Since it was cloudy, the exposure kept constantly changing, so I had to readjust the flash so it wouldn’t over expose her because of the ambient light constantly changing. The flash made things a little more complicated but not too much. I did underexpose her more often than not, but that's not an issue on Sony cameras.

The colors coming out of the Canon FD 50mm f1.4 were vibrant and swayed more to warmer brownish hues. The way it rendered the ambient and the flash made her skin tones really pleasant. I’m always amazed by this lens. The lens came out in 1971, so compared to modern lenses, it’s not that sharp, but even shooting at f1.4, the images came out acceptably sharp in the center. After reviewing these images, I kind of want to get a Minolta lens and see how the colors are rendered with that.

The second lens I used was the trusty Helios 44-2. This soviet lens is known for the swirly bokeh it produces. It’s incredibly unique in that sense. Even thought its extremely difficult to use and it takes a lot of practice know learn how to get the swirly bokeh, when it hits, the results are amazing.

I have shot with this lens for years but I had forget just how muddy and blurry the sides of the image gets shooting it wide open. You typically don’t frame the subject close to the long edges of the frame, but I wanted to get some full body shots of Vianey, so in some of the photos her shoes and blurry. That was a mistake. Her head and legs came out looking like if the lens had a layer of grease.

Luckily, everything else came out fairly sharp. All of the photos I took in landscape were really good. The lens also has a distinct way it renders colors. It’s fairly similar to the canon lens, but the skin tones are a bit more orange and the greens seem to be more of a deep desaturated green. I can tell the difference easily, but I think most people can't distinguish between the 2 lenses if I didn’t point out what to look for.

Even with the focus peaking, I think I got about 40% of the shots out of focus. Some still came out looking cool even though they were blurry, so I kept those as well. Editing was very minimal on here. I wanted to keep the colors of the lens and not really alter them.

Over all, the shoot and Vianey were so much fun. We all had a great time and came out with amazing photos. We ended up spending way longer than what we had originally talked about, but we kept getting ideas and trying them out. If it wasn’t for my flash running out of battery, we would have probably still been taking photos right now.

It was getting close to sunset, and since it was cloudy, it was getting dark and even colder, so we packed everything up and called it a day.

I’m going to do a few more shoots with these lenses. I really loved the process and it made me feel like I thought about each photo a lot more. It made the process a lot of fun and I liked that a lot.