Yo what up welcome back to another episode of the YouTube show that my therapist is begging me to stop making for my own mental health. But fuck that I'm gonna ride this thing to the grave. Are you looking for the perfect lens to swirl the edges of your photos and simulate the effects of taking 27 shots of fireball and getting the spins without the side effects of puking all over your uber driver? Well then I have the perfect lens for you. That's right it's my favorite 58 millimeter lens. Wait that's oddly specific. It's my favorite nifty 50 the Helios 442. Not to be confused with helis which are still a viable means of transportation for the adult on the go and I don't think it's fair for your boss to tell you to grow up when you wear them to work. The Helios 442 is a 58 millimeter Soviet produced lens that opens up to a maximum aperture of F2. And while that may seem kind of generally unremarkable, I am going to task myself with trying to explain to you why this lens is a solid pickup. Here are some shots that I've taken with the Helios which I've only ever used with 35 millimeter film. So where this lens really shines is how it renders the depth of field. As you can hopefully tell there's kind of a unique look to the bokeh that the lens produces. A swirly kind of look like a toilet being flushed as someone dangles you upside down in it. And that's what this lens is famous for. The Helios Lina lenses are quite popular with many different iterations over nearly a 40 years span. In fact this lens is considered to be one of the most widely produced lenses in the world so they can be had for a pretty affordable price. I have two of these lenses and I picked each one up for about 60 bucks each. The original incarnation of the Helios lens here featured an M39 screw mount instead of the M42 screw mount that we have on the second version here. It's also silver so that's cool but don't be quick to be tempted by their beauty because they can be kind of hard to adapt to newer cameras. Oftentimes there'll be issues focusing all the way to infinity. So that's why we look to the second version of the Helios for guidance. This lens actually feels a little heavier than one might expect. I think because it's made out of metal or some kind of aluminum but yeah it's got some heft to it and it's built to last. Though I'm more of a wide angle kind of shooter I've been using this lens on the Canon A1 for the past four years now and it's been a dream. Since the lens is an M42 screw mount lens you will likely need an adapter like the one I have here which adapts M42 screw mount lenses to Canon FD mounts. Furthermore this lens is fully manual so don't expect any autofocus or auto aperture settings. Anyway I wanted to shoot some photos with this lens so I brought it with me on a trip up to a small town called Paso Robelace for Thanksgiving. For those of you who do not know thanksgiving is the American holiday where you eat so much food you blow it up and take the biggest dump you'll take all year. So Monica Baxter and I headed up to our Airbnb in Paso Robelace which featured in aggressive amount of leopard print. I loaded up the Canon A1 with a 400 speed black and white film called Street Candy not to be confused with a certain white powdery substance that gives you a sudden burst of energy. That's right powdered sugar. This lens actually holds a special place in my heart because I took what I consider to be the best photo of my entire generally disappointing career on the helios. Here it is and I don't really give a shit if you like it or not. Though this lens can be used for all types of photography I feel like where it really excels is portrait photography. The reason I say that is because when you're shooting white open at f2 on this lens it can be a bit soft and in situations where you're focused to infinity like maybe landscape photography I found that the corners of the image are kind of distractingly unusable. There can be quite a bit of ghosting. Additionally the swirling effect only happens on the background bokeh. If there are any foreground objects out of focus it is not quite the same effect. In fact I think it actually kind of looks like f***. Furthermore it's worth mentioning that if you stop down the aperture on the lens the swirl effect kind of diminishes and the overall sharpness of the lens becomes greater. Any corner ghosting effects that might be happening to also seem to kind of go away. I will string whatever is open and native to me. At first glance the clickless aperture on the helios may seem as backwards with the lens being wide open at the f16 mark. But actually in Soviet the Russia it is used as as backwards. From what I can figure out the way you're supposed to use this lens is to change the aperture lock to whatever aperture you want to use. So let's say f8. Once you set that you won't be able to close the aperture down beyond f8. But other wider apertures like f4 for example will still be available. As mentioned before the aperture is clickless and buttery smooth. If you're shooting with a camera like the Canon AE1 that has a through the lens light meter you can actually get more accurate exposures this way by writing the aperture dial until the light meter on the camera tells you you're perfectly exposed. Yeah. There's no sugar coating it. I think these color shots look like soggy ball sack. This shot right here is the best of the set in my opinion because apparently I can't shoot street lights enough on this channel. Does this lens flare up like a bad rash of unknown origin located on your upper thigh? You bet. I found that a lot of flare happens around like f2. Stopping down to f2.8 actually kind of alleviates a lot of the flare. Basically the flare or glow kind of works in some situations though. You may have heard me say earlier in the video that I have two copies of the Helios 442 lenses and one copy of the original version. So I actually have two Helios 442 lenses because the first one I bought was kind of beat up and I thought that the images it produced were kind of soft so I bought a second one that looked better taken care of for sure. And when you know it it was soft too. I don't know. Just a thing with this lens like how it's just a thing with our neighbors when they report us watching the Garfield movie too loudly at 2am. In the end yeah this lens definitely has some softness when shooting wide open. As I mentioned before stopping down the aperture will definitely yield sharper results but at the cost of less swirliness. I haven't personally used any of the newer iterations of this lens which apparently have more coatings on the glass for better image quality. I'm honestly just in love with the character that this lens has and whenever I'm shooting with the Canon AE1. This is the 50 that I bring along. And if I haven't convinced you to pick one up yet then I guess all hope is lost for you. But you've probably already heard that from your parents.