AFS at Rickmansworth Folk Festival 2024
AFS went to the Rickmansworth Folk Festival, organised by the Rickmansworth Town Team, on the 20th July 2024. We had a wonderful time watching all the fabulous performances and moving around between performances taking photographs for people attending and performing at the festival.
Vintage lens photography
If you were at the festival and had your photo taken by us, you might have thought that the lens we had on the camera looked a little old fashioned. You are right; we were shooting on a vintage lens that was produced in the USSR.
The Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 is a soviet-era clone of the Biotar lens manufactured by famous German optics company Carl Zeiss. Nowadays the lens is much sort after by artistic photographers and filmmakers because of the unique look of the images it produces.
Take a look at the photo at the top of this article, which we took of our tutor Sintija at the festival. Notice how pleasing the soft background is and how it has a distinctive “swirly” feeling. This swirly background (“Bokeh”) is a characteristic of this lens.
Also, with the lens aperture wide open, the center of the image is sharp while the edges are in soft focus. This would normally be considered a defect, but for artistic portrait photography it lends the image an ethereal feel and helps draw attention to our subject.
Vintage lenses are harder to use and less-reliable than modern ones; you'd never find a lens like this in a mobile phone or a modern camera. The images they produce have many “imperfections” which mean they can't be used as general-purpose lenses suitable for all situations. It is precisely these “imperfections” that make them much more interesting for artistic photography.
We hope to see you at another festival in the area soon so you can have your portrait taken with this gorgeous classic lens.