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How to create autofocus with a 120 year old lens

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Mathieu Stern’s at it again with his crazy experiments. This time, he’s taken the lens off a 120 year old folding camera, and attached it to his Sony mirrorless camera. This is nothing new, but what is new is that he’s given it autofocus abilities.

The first autofocus lenses were released around 40 years ago, so this is quite the feat. He used an ingenious adapter designed to give autofocus abilities to manual focus Leica lenses on the Sony A7 range of bodies. Mathieu then modified the adapter to fit this 120 year old lens.

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Extreme lens modding with the Helios 44-2

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I’m Tito Ferradans and today we’re here to work on a few upgrades to the Helios 44-2 Extreme mod. You probably watched the original video, as it is the most popular one in the channel. After finishing the mod and doing it over and over to fulfill ebay orders, I started to wonder about some other components I handled repeatedly for the mod.

Namely the optics. Not everyone wants polishing – which I can understand, and I myself prefer the unpolished version – so I kept staring at this black coating that covered the sides of the biggest glass elements. I decided to give it a go and try to take it off. In order to do that, I used what I had at hand: nail polish remover.

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Taking sandpaper to M42 lenses to get that anamorphic look on the cheap

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Tito Ferradans here for a lengthy video involving some serious modding and unique looks. Summer is here and DIY projects are up. A few weeks ago I was blown away by a few photos posted by one Victor Danell with a modified Helios 44. His process was to “polish” the glass elements with a strong abrasive and sand the inside of the barrel in order to increase how light bounces around.

The resulting effect is a light and wonderful glow to the brighter areas of the frame. It’s an effect I was trying to re-create in post since forever and having the opportunity to do it in-camera was just too much to resist. Then I pushed the concept a bit further, painted some things inside the lens, replaced the aperture and added a flare filter inside the lens as well.

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Shooting amazing portraits using vintage lenses

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Regular readers here on DIYP will know how much we like seeing Mathieu Stern’s videos. He’s shown us some great old and weird lenses working with modern cameras and shared a few cool stories. Now, he’s teamed up with fellow French photographer Serge Ramelli to talk about portraits. More specifically, they’re portraits with vintage lenses.

In these two videos, Mathieu introduces Serge to vintage lenses, and the pair also offer up a challenge. They’ve made raw files available and want to see how you’d post process some of the images Mathieu shot using old Canon FD lenses. The second video shows the adapter Mathieu uses to connect FD lenses to his Sony A7II and why he’s now ditched ND filters from the front of his lenses.

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Shooting with a 50+ year old Russian lens on a Sony A7RII

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The Helios 44-2 is one of my favourite old lenses. This, along with the Jupiter-9 are my two most used manual focus lenses for stills and video. The Helios 44 line started in 1958. Its initial design is a copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2, and was produced by KMZ for the M42 mount. Since that first version, it’s been through several iterations as technology has advanced.

In this video from Manny Ortiz, we see the Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens in action on a Sony A7RII. When you see the looks that can be achieved by this lens it’s easy to see why this quickly becomes a favourite of all who own one. The fact that they can be picked up for as low as $10 just makes it one that should be in everybody’s bag.

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Seven secrets to buying cheap lenses online

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Over the last few years, cheap lenses have become a big thing, and it’s driven the prices of a number of old cheap lenses right back up to where they used to be when new.

This video from Mathieu Stern of the Weird Lens Challenge presents us with his top seven tips to buying cheap lenses online.  Some of them just make good sense, while others are not so obvious.

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