Vintage Lenses – More adventures with my lens spanner

My Soviet 1957 Jupiter 9 85mm f2

So, having successfully opened up a Helios 44-2 and reversed the front element using a newly purchased lens spanner (blogged here), I decided to attack another couple of lenses this week. Things went pretty well initially but, I learnt a tough lesson through inexperience with these older lenses.

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Lens-Artists Challenge #389 – Time To Relax

Dogs have no trouble relaxing most of the time. My dog is the really lazy hound in the background. The dog in the foreground is her brother, who belongs to my sister.

Anne hosts this weeks challenge which is themed on ‘Time to relax’. My personal routines for relaxing revolve around photography, walking and visiting new places. Nothing particularly special to share with you all so I thought I’d post a few images that fit the theme. You can view Annes original post here.

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Vintage Lenses – Helios 44-2 with a reversed front element

An early shot with the modified lens. I took the lens out with us to grab some shots this morning but we were unlucky with the weather and walked straight into a monsoon like squall. Thinking of my wife and dogs welfare I agreed to put the camera away and go for a coffee until the squall blew through. I know, I’m a good guy. Actually, the truth of the matter is I was more worried about getting my vintage lens and Sony A7 wet!!

Having scoured so many vintage lens blogs and watched hours of vintage lens YouTube videos over the last few months, I was aware that lens elements could be reversed to achieve some quirky effects. It was something I hadn’t considered trying until I stumbled across Nadin Thomsons wonderful photography blog site. Here’s a link to Nadins site, it’s well worth making a visit – nadinthomson.co.uk

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Photography – A New Camera

My new (second hand) Sony A7 MkIII with a 1958 Jupiter 9 85mm f2 vintage lens

I’ve written recently about my interest in vintage lenses and how much I’ve enjoyed using them. It’s very rare that I use my modern Fuji lenses these days. So, having convinced myself that using vintage lenses is not just a passing fad I decided to enhance my use of them by investing in a full frame camera.

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Lens-Artists #386: The Power of Juxtaposition

Patti sets this weeks Lens-Artist Challenge – The power of juxtaposition. Her original challenge post can be found here. I’m glad Patti included a definition of juxtaposition because I had no idea what the term meant. My initial thoughts were ‘I do this a lot’ but when I went looking through my images I realised I don’t !

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Lens-Artists Challenge#385 – Unusual Crop

Ritva hosts this weeks Lens-Artist Challenge and has asked us to provide image examples of unusual or extreme cropping – ‘This week, we encourage you to deliberately defy traditional framing conventions.‘ Ritvas original challenge post can he found here.

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International Lego Day – 28/01/26

Rachel and Ross on the apartment balcony. I’ve given them a slight dusting of snow – actually it’s icing sugar!

Yesterday, 28th January, was ‘International Lego Day’. I didn’t know, or realise, this until late in the day when I saw a related Lego post on Flickr. So, although I started writing my article yesterday I’m a day late posting as I didn’t have my Lego images available to upload.

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