Back sometime in 2022 I decided I’d try out a few vintage lenses with my Fujifilm camera’s. I’m not sure why. It was probably following something I’d read on the internet but anyway, I decided to give it a go and invested in an K&F M42 to Fujifilm X Adapter. They sell for £16.99 from K&F.

That opened up a host of vintage M42 threaded lenses. I started with some really cheap Helios lenses. I enjoyed using them and the images they created so, after some research, I bought myself a Pentacon 135mm F2.8. It’s described in some places as The Bokeh Monster because of the smooth bokeh it can create in the right circumstances. They sell on ebay for £60-£80.

I haven’t used my vintage lenses for a while so I decided to put the Pentacon lens on my X-T2 this morning and take it out with me whilst we were walking the dog. I set the camera to manual focus mode, selected ‘Peak Focusing’ to help nail my focusing, tried a test shot and all was looking good.

I normally use an X-T5 these days and it wasn’t long, once we were out and about, before I wished the Pentacon was sitting on the front of that camera. I’d forgotten what a heavy lens this is. It’s also very long with the adapter and doesn’t balance that well with the X-T2. I found it quite hard to hold the camera steady and at one stage I was shooting in woodland where the light wasn’t that brilliant. The X-T5 has body stabilisation which would have been a big help here. All that said I did come back with some pics I was really pleased with.

I’m not someone for delving in to all the technical stuff in relation to lens reviews. I just normally like sharp lenses and buy the best I can. My main working lenses are all professional grade so I wouldn’t necessarily be using the vintage lenses for images I want to get through stock image quality control checks.

This lens was pretty good though and these days software like Photoshop and Topaz AI can correct lots of problems. I’ve processed the images here through my normal workflow. So they would go in to Abode Raw as raw images.

I’d make any initial corrections there (this lens did seem to push the colour temperature tint slider right over to the mauve and needed bringing back). I then put the image into Photoshop, make any further corrections there before running the image through Topaz. Once its back in Photoshop I have an action that saves the image as a jpg and then runs another action called MCP Optimise for FB which resizes and preps the image for web use. That all sounds quite complicated but it’s not. I can process images like these in a few minutes each.

I’ve processed the raw files rather than upload images straight from the camera because I do this to all my images, expensive lens or not. It seems logical to me that I’d do the same with the Pentacon lens. It still retains its unique look as you can see really well in the portrait image below.

I think I’ll carry on using the X-T2 for the other vintage lenses as I can leave it set up in manual mode with the converter attached. I plan on taking a few more of my favourite vintage lenses out with me over the next few weeks. I’ll blog those as and when I have some new images to post.

All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2025 – All rights reserved.