TLDR: I keep it simple and real.
Shooting in a candid style with minimal ‘posing’ creates beautiful photos that will evoke your memories.
Technical Information:
I use modern lenses often, particularly for product photography and with good contrast, exposure and sharpness they can create stunning photographs. However, there is something quite different about images taken through a lens that wasn’t made for the digital age. A lens with imperfections from years of use. A lens with inherent flaws built in to it’s design. A lens with less than perfect contrast or colours.
The overall warmth and the minor reduction in sharpness that older lenses typically produce cannot be replicated in editing. It makes photos look more ‘real’ and ‘natural’.
Here is a small selection of the vintage lenses that I like to use.
The way in which phones in particular record images and immediately manipulate them using AI and software, gives many photographs an un-natural look.
Recording a moment in exacting detail is not photography, it does not capture the feel of an occasion.
I have spent frankly far too much time looking at wedding photographs. The composition of the best images is often flawed but they often have a more natural quality that is, in my opinion, very much lost in most modern photography.
About the lenses pictured
The Helios 44 is one of the world’s most famous lenses. It creates a unique background blur which has swirl and an ethereal quality. It’s been used on from big budget films, and professional photo shoots for decades. I have several examples of this lens but my favourite one, pictured above, is an early 44-2 model made in 1973 by KMZ. This is widely accepted to be one of the best variants of the lens. I also have examples of the 44-M4 variant which has superior contrast but less character.
The Industar 61 L/D is also a fascinating lens. Built in Ukraine in 1990, my copy is one of the last produced while the country was still part of the USSR. It has Lanthanum infused glass, producing a slightly cooler but still very natural colour range and much less chromatic aberration than standard optics of the period.
The Pentacon/MeyerOptik Gorlitz Orestogor 135mm is a particularly sharp optic. My copy was made back in 1987 in GDR (East Germany). It has seen some action in a previous life but thanks to it’s rugged all metal construction, still produces excellent short telephoto portrait images.