If you’re looking for a high-quality, sharp lens with fantastic bokeh, vintage lenses can be a great option. They can give you images of great quality, yet you can buy many of them at very affordable prices. In this video, Mathieu Stern compares three vintage lenses for shooting portraits: Konica 40mm f/1.8, Porst 50mm f/1.4, and Jupiter 9 85mm f/2. He paid the cheapest among them around $6, so let’s see how they perform.
This vintage Russian spy lens is perfect for portraits, and it costs $40
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Photographer and videographer Mathieu Stern is known for his passion for weird lenses. He recently repurposed a Russian spy lens Cyclop h3t-1. It comes attached to a night vision device, and it was used by the Russian army and even the KGB. However, Mathieu tested how it performs for shooting portraits- and the results are surprisingly good.
This 70 year old projector lens creates “insane swirly bokeh” that rivals a $7K Leica
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Weird and crazy lenses is what Mathieu Stern has become known for. He seems to find some of the most unusual lenses that ever existed, and then makes them fit onto his Sony mirrorless camera. Fortunately for us, he posts images and video captured by those lenses he finds to YouTube.
And this particular lens is a beauty. A Carl Zeiss Kipronar 120mm f/1.9 projector lens which cost him only $70. It’s fixed wide open at f/1.9 and was never meant to be used for shooting photos. But Mathieu was able to adapt it. He says the closest he could find to a modern equivalent of this lens is the $7,000 Leica APO-Macro_Summarit-S F2.5/120mm.
What happens when you pair 140-year-old lens with $15,000 RED cinema camera
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In Mathieu Stern’s videos, we’ve seen some fantastic vintage lenses paired with modern cameras. In his latest video, he pulls off another unordinary combination of camera and lens. He mounts a lens that’s older than the Eiffel Tower on a $15,000 RED Dragon camera and shoots video in daylight and in low light. The results are wonderful, and you can check them out in the video.
Shooting with Helios-65, a lens so rare there’s no adapter for it
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Most of us have heard (or owned) lenses from Helios 44 series. But photographer and filmmaker Mathieu Stern has found an ultra-rare Soviet lens with extraordinary bokeh. He got himself a Helios-65 50mm f/2, a lens so rare that there’s no adapter on the market for it. So, he 3D-printed his own adapter and put this vintage lens to a test.
This is what happens when you shoot portraits with infrared cameras
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Infrared photography can give some unique images with some kind of an unworldly feel. Mathieu Stern wanted to see what it would look like to take portraits with this technique. He converted two cameras to shoot infrared, but they capture different wavelength. With a little help from his friends, he took some portraits with the converted camera, as well as a regular one. He has shared the results with us, and they are really interesting.
These three vintage lenses produce crazy bokeh
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It’s the holiday season and it seems like Christmas lights are everywhere you look. Photographer Mathieu Stern has taken advantage of this and he’s turned those lights into some crazy bokeh. In his latest video, he uses three cheap vintage lenses and turns the Christmas lights into rich, sparkly, “bokehlicious” backdrop. So if you’re planning some holiday-themed portraits, maybe you can look for these lenses at flea markets or eBay.
Photographers, beware of what could be vanity gallery scams
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Unfortunately, we live in the world where scams take plenty of forms and target different kinds of people. Photographer Mathieu Stern has recently received an email which, according to him, turned out to be a scam targeting photographers. It comes from a vanity gallery in London, and it’s aimed at taking money from photographers who’d like to get their works exhibited.
Seven tricks to help you smile naturally and look great in photos
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If you’re a portrait photographer, it’s useful to know how to make your models smile naturally. And when you are the person in front of the lens, you’ll see how difficult it is to make your smile look unforced. Mathieu Stern shares seven tips that will help the models smile. And of course, they’re also great for photographers when capturing self-portraits.
The exact moment this photographer broke his $800 lens
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What do you do when you shoot in the harsh wind? Well, photographer Mathieu Stern learned it the hard way that he should add weight to the tripod when it’s windy. Although he has quite a collection of cheap vintage lenses, the wind managed to tip over the tripod with his camera and an $800 Sony E 10-18mm f/4 lens. Since he was shooting the video at that moment, he accidentally captured the unfortunate event, too.
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