Vintage Soviet era Helios 40 lens cleaning and refurb.

Disclaimer: Old Soviet lenses are interesting to use, and can be found pretty easily at reasonable prices (okay, not this lens, but still). Ownership of, and interest in, these lenses should not be interpreted as approval of the Russian government's actions or policies. This should not need to be pointed out, but this is the internet, so..... yeah. Just saying.

A Helios-40 lens. It was made in 1961, and is sought after by vintage lens weirdos for its crazy swirly bokeh. It's pretty hard to find, making it the most expensive vintage lens I have. It was around $350. It's a huge lens, considering it's not even a zoom lens. There's a lot of glass in it. They don't appear often, and they're famous for being "The Bokeh Monster". So, they command a premium, considering it's an old mechanical lens.

The optical section on the left, having been separated from the helicoid (on the right), which is the target of this project. No way was I going to take apart the optics, even if they do have a few specks of dust. My mission was to clean and lighten up the focus ring action. Soviet-era Russian lenses are said to have been lubricated with tank grease. This one sure felt like it. Stiff and gummy. Trying to turn the focus ring often unscrewed the lens from the adapter holding it on the camera. This is unfavorable.

Scratch marks indicate where parts need to be clocked (rotationally positioned in relation to each other) for proper function when reassembled. There were already some scratches on the parts, indicating that someone had been in here before.

2mm screwdriver. It required frequent "resharpening" with a whetstone.

Note the thick and filthy alleged "tank grease".

The large threads are the helicoid, which is how the lens focuses. There are about 16 parallel threads in it, instead of like one or two. This means if you get the threaded parts engaged in one of the fifteen wrong combinations, the lens won't work right when you put it back together. Between the scratch marks already on it and the ones I added, I got confused about the orientation and I absolutely put it back together wrong... several times. Whee.

All the components of the helicoid, unassembled.

Finish Line is a favorite cleaner / degreaser made for bike chains. Made from orange peels. It's not dangerous to your health (unless you drink it), plus it smells really nice.

The focus collar had been manufactured with polishing marks in different directions. I masked with tape while I touched them up. First one direction, then the other.

The knurling had some kind of gunk in the grooves, of course. The "fixed" portion is on the left. "With vintage goo" is on the right.

A woven nylon polishing wheel. A little harsher than a cotton wheel, so it leaves a "brushed" finish. Hence, the carefulness regarding the direction of polishing.

The knurling on the right side still has the pitting and scratches yet to be taken out. The left half is cleaned up.

Cotton wheel for the faces that seem to have been intended to not have a grain to them.

Focus collar with vintage scratches visible at the bottom.

Care was taken to not obliterate the engraved markings.

Soaking again in the degreaser to remove the polishing compound.

This is a silicone grease I made by mixing silicone spray and pure silicone grease. It turned out to be a mistake. The spray was nice and thin to begin with, but after the solvent in it evaporated, it just left a very heavy grease. Too heavy for a camera lens. The right stuff turned out to be Marvel Mystery Oil (not pictured). Disassemble, degrease, and start over.

An observation on the design of old Russian lenses, compared to others. They're not very sophisticated. When you work the focus mechanism of this lens, the black ring on the left rotates against the silver barrel. It's an aluminum ring against the brass of the barrel. A Japanese lens would never allow this to happen. There would either be a bearing there, or it wouldn't be a friction point at all. In the case of this lens, it's just a film of grease keeping the two from grinding against each other. With some careful sandpaper and 3M pad work, I was able to smooth out the interface where the barrel and collar meet. There were a couple of places in this lens that I was surprised to find room for simple improvements like this.

A 2mm x 3mm screw. Don't drop it. But of course, I did. At least I had had the presence of mind to be working on a brightly colored towel, so the screw didn't bounce merrily across the bench and onto the floor, to be lost in the mists of time itself.

Reassembled, and about as good as I was capable of getting it. At least I managed to get the helicoid cleaned up. It's much lighter and whippy to use now.

It's an 85mm f/1.5, which lets in a huge amount of light. It's a very flattering portrait lens, and can be used easily in dim light. The aperture is wide open in this photo. Russian lenses are courteous enough to put the year in the serial number, almost always as the first two digits. So, this lens is a 1961 model. The logo at the bottom there is the mark of the KMZ plant, located just outside Moscow.

Cheap vs. Expensive Speed Booster / Focal Reducer test... For Science! (Not actually for science.)

This one's for all our Photography Nerd readers. Or, rather, it will be once we get some.



WHY THIS TEST? (A little geekdom here, but not too much.)

I recently found out that Fujifilm (maker of cameras and film stock from Way Back) cameras have, in their firmware, "film emulation" presets. Unlike the silly generic filters that most cameras have in them, the Fuji mimics, as close as you can hope for, the look of Fuji's famously beautiful film stocks, as well as others by Kodak, etc. So, there are film presets like Velvia, Portra, Kodachrome, and many others. Since playing around with vintage lenses is very much a thing of mine, this discovery was one which made my eyebrows do an excited little dance. Fast forward a week or so, and I became the new owner of a used Fujifilm X-T10: a camera from about five years ago, making it positively ancient in digital camera years. As a result, it was pretty damn cheap.

Now, most old lenses are meant for shooting on a 35mm camera. Trouble is, not all current cameras have an image sensor (the digital bit that does the job that film used to do) that's the same size as a 35mm film negative. The Fuji camera I just picked up has a sensor 25% smaller than the image that an old lens projects onto it. So as a result, the outer edges of the image falls off the edge of the camera's sensor and isn't captured. The lens will still work on the camera, but the image will be a little more "zoomed in" than it should be, and also, you lose some brightness, since not all of the light is hitting the image sensor. In general, this whole situation is called "crop factor".

For more detailed explanation, your browser will more or less explode with pedantic photography enthusiast opinions when you search on "camera crop factor". Enjoy

A cropped image isn't ideal, because, with vintage lenses, lots of the interesting stuff you get comes from the edge of the lens. Some lenses have darker edges (vignette), and lots of old lenses, in the out of focus areas, don't just blur the image, they smear or swirl the image in crazy ways (swirly bokeh). Yes, technically, these are flaws. But, in the age when your average smartphone can capture bright, sharp, accurate images with impressive fidelity, the weirdness of old lenses deliver personality and charm. This is where the fascination comes in. So, losing the edges of the lens' image loses part of the fun.

To remedy the problem of  cropped images when adapting old lenses to non-full-frame (or "cropped sensor) cameras, there are things called "speed booster / focal reducers". Any vintage lens is going to need an adapter just to be mounted on the modern camera body, but a speed booster is an adapter that also has in it a corrective lens that focuses the incoming image down to fit better onto the image sensor. This not only has the effect of making the picture look more like it should. It also makes the image brighter, since much less light is being thrown away. On average, a focal reducing adapter like this will add a full stop of extra light to the image.

A company called Metabones basically invented focal reducing lens adapters, and as of this writing, theirs are still unquestionably the best. If you're putting yet another glass element between the lens and your camera, you want it to be as well made as you can afford, so it only helps - and does no harm to -  the resulting image. There are now many MANY cheap knockoff speed boosters, mostly made in China, which cost less than 1/6 of what you'd pay for a Metabones model. Are they all junk? How close can you get to the performance of the original Metabones for a fraction of the money? Good question.

IT'S A WHAT, THEN?

The generic term for these devices is "speed booster / focal reducer / lens adapter". The "speed booster" term comes from the fact that you're getting more light on the sensor and can then use a faster shutter speed. Blah blah blah. Anyway, this generic term is a mouthful, so when someone says "speed booster", they're talking about these devices and don't want to use the whole phrase, maybe because they have to work in the morning.

SHAMEFUL SHOPPING

Shortly after buying the Fuji camera, I went on Ebay and bought a Chinese speed booster. The listing didn't mention the brand at all. So, consider it generic. It cost $70.

After a few days, temptation got the better of me and I bought a Metabones speed booster. It cost $450. Ow. That's much more than I paid for the camera it's meant to work with. But, I've had one for my Olympus camera for years, and I knew their stuff to be built to a very high standard with state of the art glass in it. It's definitely a price that's hard to overlook, but with fifty-ish old lenses that will work better in its company, I found a way to justify the expense.

All of my old lenses are adapted to the ubiquitous Canon FD lens mount. I have Nikons, Canons, Asahis, Mirs, Meyer-Gorlitzes, Helioses... and they all have little adapters on them to convert them to the Canon FD bayonet mount, just because it was so common. So, both of the adapters I bought convert Canon FD to Fuji X mount.

This picture may help make it clear what the speed booster / lens adapter / focal reducer is doing.


From left to right: Early 1970s Asahi-Pentax Super Takumar Lens (with a thin little Canon FD adapter stuck on it), Metabones speed booster adapter thing / camera body.

THE CONTENDERS

Disclaimer: I didn't get these for free. I spent my own hard-earned Big American Bucks on them.

On the left is the Metabones ($450). On the right is the Pixco ($70). Oh, by the way, the previously anonymous Chinese speed booster turns out to be a "Pixco" branded unit. The Ebay seller might want to mention that in their listing. Anything to help it seem less like a fly-by-night Ebay scam.

Interestingly, the lens in the Metabones adapter is a little larger in diameter. Also notice that the Chinese version only has three screws holding it together, while the Metabones has five. This kind of stuff can be found throughout a casual examination of both units. Unsurprisingly, the Metabones weighs a little more than the Pixco.

PEEPING THE PIXELS

The test image I used is a huge framed poster of 8 bit pixel art. It has lots of color and detail, so it seemed like a good choice. If you're looking for laboratory conditions and stuff, you might want to head over to DPReview.com, because you ain't getting that here. Sorry not sorry.

Both sets of test images were taken using the same Super Takumar lens with the aperture wide open at f/1.8. Don't forget that it's a manual lens, which means that both images were focused manually by yours truly, which introduces an unavoidable margin of error.

This image will open at 1600px wide if you click on it.

Blah blah image 1600px click, etc.

For seventy dollars, the Pixco is not bad! Colors are pretty much the same as those produced by the Metabones, and sharpness is roughly equivalent... in the center, at least. To flip between them, try opening each in a new browser tab.

Here's a 2-up shot of the above images...

Click blah 1600 bigger, blah.

Click big etc. etc. etc.

This image (above) is a 100% crop of the center of each image. So, one photo pixel is one image pixel on your screen.

The Pixco is still not bad for seventy bucks. The Metabones has just slightly more contrast. So, maybe the Pixco has just a tiny bit of haze in the glass. Look at the black outlines on the soldiers to see this. But still, that's splitting hairs.

At the edges is where the differences become much more obvious. This is the upper left corner of the image. The Pixco loses a lot of contrast and clarity at the edges. This is where the extra $380 dollars went. Sure, the Metabones is better, but is it 600% better?

CONCLUSION

The Cheapco Pixco does a fine job for $70! (Well, the copy I received, at least). Thankfully, there are obvious differences in the Metabones image, so I don't feel like a sucker for spending the money on it. But a side by side comparison like this is something that I would have liked to see before I spent the money, purely in the interest of making an informed decision.

The Pixco is definitely softer at the edges. But really, is this a deal breaker - especially for someone interested in using the adapter purely with vintage lenses, which generally feature "quirky shenanigans" at the edge of the image anyway? I mean, I don't feel any buyer's remorse about the Metabones, partly because it's a beautifully made bit of gear, and I like that any personality in the resulting images will come from the old lens, and not from a lens adapter engineered down to a price point. But if I was, say, a college student who couldn't justify over four times the price, the Pixco is a more than acceptable option.

One thing to consider, though, is this: With a major company like Metabones, you can pretty much count on consistent quality from one example to the next. When buying  a no-name brand with a name you've never heard of from an anonymous factory, personal experience has shown that every purchase is a roll of the dice. Part of what you're paying for when you buy a known product from a company with a reputation to protect is not just the quality of the product, but the consistency of that quality between examples. In the case of this Pixco, maybe I just got a lucky copy that more or less works as it should?

Thanks for reading!

Excitable Photographer - March, 1959

Fuelfed car show - 10/27/2019 - Part 2

Here are the rest of the photos from the Fuelfed car show from last Sunday, 10/27/19 in Winnetka, Illinois.

Early in the show, I was framing up a Jaguar, trying to fit the whole car in the frame, when a car rolled through my shot. I immediately shat myself, because it was unmistakably a Lancia Delta Integrale: the legendary rally champion, in Martini livery no less. Lancias are rare in the U.S. They were briefly sold here under the Fiat brand, but you basically never ever see them, no matter how many vintage events you go to.

The Delta Integrale's dash.

The only thing that could me more trouser-moisteningly great than seeing a Delta Integrale in the flesh would be a Lancia Stratos. The Delta was based on the Delta consumer model, but the Stratos was Lancia's purpose-built rally car that looks like a spaceship. It is the coolest looking thing ever created by humans.

It was once the case that headlights were a single, replaceable unit. These were called "sealed beam" headlights, and they were generally round or square. The look of a round light recessed into an elliptical (or nearly so) housing is hard to improve upon. With the development of hallogen, LED or other just-replace-the-bulb modern headlights, the housing itself is intended to be permanent, and is worked into the shape of the grille or whatever. They can be any random, arbitrary shape, and the car manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact by making headlights any crazy, random shape they can think of. This is just one way in which the majority of current cars are overstyled and visually cluttered. By way of example, go look at a 2019 Honda Civic Si, and then look at this Dino. Grace and balance has been abandoned for hyperactive aggression for its own sake. This is awful.

The Ferrari Dino that makes stout-hearted men swoon.

It's hard to stop shooting a Dino. Every angle is basically a work of art.

This photo makes clear the poor quality of the 1985 Tokina lens I was shooting with. The highlight the the lower left explodes into a soft bloom of pale orange light. If your objective is to capture reality as your eye sees it, this is terrible. But, your phone's camera can do that. Every inexpensive kit lens can do that, too. This filthy old Tokina, which, technically speaking, could use a good thirty-year cleaning, adds goldness and pinkness, and exaggerates bright light in a trippy, dreamy way. It's my current favorite.

A De Tomaso Pantera is an Italian chassis with a  Ford V8 in the back.

The engine compartment of a Pantera is pretty weird. Huge V8, with the transmission behind it, but now drive shaft exiting the trans where it normally would. Instead, there are two half shafts going out the sides to drive the wheels. There is a surprising amount of room in the engine bay, because the bulk of the motor is just in front of the wheels. I imagine everything other than the most basic service is an engine-out procedure, which, by the looks of it, would be easier than in your average car.

I hadn't seen those wheels before. On a 911, they look great, properly dished under the huge RSR-style fender flares. The owner and his wife were debating swapping them back to OEM. I did my best to reassure them there were enough bone-stock 911s rolling around already.

The Volvo P1800 is up there with the Ferrari Dino at the top of the this-design-will-always-look-good Olympic podium. They're also mechanically simple and relatively easy to maintain. These can still be found for less than twenty thousand dollars... for now.

I'm not an off-road guy, but I'm pretty sure this is a Land Rover Defender, in its naturaly state of "kinda dirty".

A 1974 Jensen Interceptor. I'm pretty sure this car has a 7.2 liter V8. Even if it's "only" the 5.9 or 6.3 version, they always sound amazing.

You're right, badge. It is.

Add caption

Mercedes 300SL. This one should be one of the later, non-gullwing '57-'63 roadster models. Don't care. Still pretty. Actually, the gullwing versions are said to be too warm inside. The gullwing doors are to blame for that. As with any gullwing door, it's difficult to engineer them with a proper roll-down window mechanism. This little niggle is easily enough addressed by just taking the top off entirely. More affordable, too.

Porsche 356. Visually, this car pretty clearly bridges the gap between the VW Karmann-Ghia and the Porsche 911.

You don't see grille badges much any more, except on vintage cars. That's a shame.

This is the same Lamborghini Countach that I saw two weeks previously at the Then & Now show in Lake Forest. So, only one shot of it here. Unlike at the Lake Forest show, the doors were open, because there was no threat of rain.

Love this color. I don't know the factory paint designation for the color, but it person it was more apple green than lime green. The yellow fog light covers really looked good against it. If I ever were to get a car painted, making a change from a factory color, it'd be something like this.