King of Bokeh?

While I was in Romsey, I visited a charity (thrift) shop. There was a good selection of photographic stuff. A rather nice collection of Canon gear, a Pentax ME super, and so on. I’m happy with what I have in those departments, but I did come across one of the old Zenith (Helios) lenses.

My first SLR was a Zenith 11, it had the classic lens that everyone now raves about, but when I had mine, it was just considered an average, but maybe adequate standard lens. Although Bokeh has been around since the start of photography, my opinion is that it has only become popular since people have been fitting older “film lenses” to (mostly) micro 4/3rds cameras. We’ve all seen more than enough pictures of twinkly lights, out of focus in the backgrounds of photo’s. Despite that – for old times sake…

The lens is actually a 58mm, slightly longer than the popular 50mm. It has 8 blades to it’s iris and it’s this against others with less, that gives a nice round aperture. I had a few frames left on a roll of FP4+ so I set off to give it one of my typically un-scientific but “real world” tests.

I too looked out for a point of light in the background but found nothing. Then I thought, well typically this is what I’d photograph, so carried on. In the example above I’ve taken the same image 4 times on each aperture, and compensated with a slower speed, up on one, down on the other. Scanned together then compiled in photoshop. The background is just discernible in the f5.6 exposure a brick driveway. Certainly nice Bokeh wider than f4.

My second example confirms this, maybe a colour film would have produced a better example or indeed a subject with a point of light source, but it was fun to try. I’m not sure I’ll keep the lens. I have more than enough lenses of this sort of length, and bokeh isn’t something that fascinates me. None the less a fun play for £5!