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.
Extreme lens modding with the Helios 44-2
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.
These cheap Soviet lenses are as out of this world as their “Jupiter” name would imply
Jupiter was a class of lens made by manufacturers of the former Soviet Union. There were quite a few different lenses in the Jupiter lineup, and in this set of videos from Mathieu Stern, we’re going to learn about four of them.
A lot of people tend to ignore older lenses, but I picked up a Jupiter-9 85mm f/2 lens last year, and it rapidly became one of my favourite portrait lenses, and it’s fantastic for video. After seeing these videos, I might have to add a couple more to my list.
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