Adapting Lenses for Fun Pain and Profit Suffering
Ilford Ortho Plus 80 // Nikon F5 // Helios 44M-2 58mm f/2 (Adapted to F Mount) (Shittily)
An older one this time - from Sept. 2020. The last time I spent any money on adapting "classic" lenses to new mounts. Also a commentary on why photography YouTube in $CURRENT_YEAR is sometimes frustrating to me.
YouTubers stop recommending adapting cheap soviet glass challenge (impossible)
The Helios 44 is an old soviet lens design that has achieved some cult legend status among DSLR/Mirrorless portrait photographers and videographers (specifically the 44M-2, an m42 thread mount lens that is exceptionally available and mechanically easy to adapt). It's a very cheap nifty-fifty(eight) that's relatively fast, and is supposedly one of the most produced lenses of all time, being in production for something like 40 years.
And it sucks.
First of all, adapting a lens to a different system typically means buying an adapter that accepts the lens mount on one side and has the appropriate mount for the body you want to use on the other. However, lenses manufactured for a specific mount will expect that, when mounted, they are a very specific distance away from the film/sensor plane - generally measured to the hundredth of a millimeter. In this case, the m42 mount and the F mount have flange focal distances that make it impossible to add something between the lens and the body and maintain the ability to focus at infinity. Somehow you'd have to sink the m42 mount lens 1.04mm into the F mount body in order for everything to add up. Anyone promising that a m42 lens will focus to infinity with an F mount adapter is either lying to you, has modified the lens in some way, or is using an adapter that will reduce the quality of your image (or the specific lens you're looking to get has a quirk - which I will explain shortly).
How to not get ripped off buying adapted lenses
- First and foremost you can sometimes just replace the mount on the lens. This is not always possible depending on the lens you have, but third-party glass (lenses from companies like Rokinon/Takumar/Laowa etc.) that can be purchased in any number of mounts typically design their lenses such that the mount itself can easily be removed and replaced with another. Generally, this is only possible with relatively new lens designs. This doesn't quite work for the Helios because, again, the lens needs to somehow come further into the camera body. A mount swap alone will not accomplish this.
- You can mechanically alter the lens. Some lenses will have set screws that allow for adjustment to compensate/calibrate for imprecise construction. On other lenses you can try to grind down or remove parts of the original lens construction to gain back the distance you need.
- For the Helios, there are two ways to do this: First, you can take a very thin m42 to F mount adapter, drill holes into the adapter, and screw it in place of the original mount. This essentially "replaces" the mount, as the original m42 threads on the helios are gone, with just the F mount from the adapter in place. After this operation, however, you've actually gained distance. You now have about 1.09mm to compensate for. The next step is to disassemble the lens from the front, remove the focusing ring (which has notches cut into it to stop the lens from focusing past it's scale), and then manually rotate the lens assembly such that it recedes past it's original configuration. Essentially placing the back element of the lens that extra 1.09mm into the lens body, getting you infinity focus. Do all of this while keeping in mind that, at this point, you're putting glass in places where your camera does not expect it to be. For this specific lens and this specific distance, most Nikon SLRs will not have any mirror clearance issues, but please don't break your camera trying this. If you aren't up to this level of surgery, the other "hack" I see is to stick a keyring between the rear element of the lens and the rest of the lens housing within the lens itself. This roughly accomplishes pushing that rear element back the extra millimeter and change, although surely modifies the optical characteristics of the lens.
- Use an adapter that has an additional piece of glass to correct for the discrepancy in FFD. This is the least good option - imagine buying a lens for the vibes and then slapping a cheap piece of glass between it and your film. It'd be like taking every photo through a windowpane.
Some lenses turn past infinity. In this case, you can kind of just, keep turning it and eventually you might get to infinity focus. Lenses that have this quirk can sometimes be adapted with a very slim adapter, but it's important to note that your focus scale on your lens will be incorrect. The Helios 44M-2 does not turn past infinity without modifying the focus ring.
If you've watched one random YouTube video about this lens, and that YouTuber has done just enough of their own research to know that getting infinity focus is a problem and needs to be talked about, you'd probably go over to eBay, type in "helios 44m-2 infinity focus", and pay like $70 with shipping to get a lens that almost guaranteed has not had any work done beyond the world's cheapest m42 to F mount adapter screwed on for you. If you're gonna buy one of these lenses, ask the seller how they've modified the lens to achieve infinity focus, and if they don't tell you exactly how they've done it, don't buy the lens.
So, you've finally adapted and modified your lens
You go through all this effort, you get your Helios 44 modified to support infinity focus, and guess what? It's as sharp as a fucking beach ball. Evidently some of this is up to the exact version of the 44-2 you end up getting (the same lens design was made in multiple different factories over time, and lenses produced by the earlier manufacturers are supposedly better). I didn't know this at the time, but the lens I ended up getting was from the second manufacturer of the 44-2 (MMZ - the Minsk Mechanical Factory, now called BelOMO - they make loupes now). Perhaps I would've liked the thing more if I had sought out a model produced by the earlier manufacturer, but I doubt it.
I shot two rolls of film on this lens and promptly sold it, fortunately I was able to get rid of it for roughly what I paid.
All that said, I do like some of the images I got on those rolls - the above image included - it was just such a hassle getting this lens to a condition where it was "usable" that my expectations for the thing had been inflated by the amount of effort it took to get there. Of course you don't get pin sharp images on a lens that is sold pretty explicitly as "the vibes lens", but I never got results I was particularly happy with. In a world where an $80 Minolta SRT 101 takes the same photo on the same film stock as all the $3k influencer Leica's, your style and the look of your glass is what makes all the difference, and this lens did not pass my vibe check.
