First (ish) roll from my new to me Kalimar SR200

A few weeks ago, I got a Helios 44 lens, which happened to be attached to a Kalimar SR200/Zenit E camera.  The seller wasn't sure the camera worked, but mechanically, it seemed to function.  The light meter even seemed to work!  

The first roll I shot in the camera came out totally blank.  Which was disappointing.  I think the issue is the film holder is very fiddly, either from wear or age.  But I'm happy to report that the second roll was totally fine!  I got 32 photos, despite the back being opened once accidentally during rewinding...

 

These are the small-sized scans from my local photo lab.   I think this is Fuji 200 film.  I've tweaked the colors, crop, and alignment in capture one slightly.  The photos with bugs in them have been cropped rather severely though (the Helios is not a macro lens, though it does have a fairly short minimum focus distance).  

I took most of these images on a quick coastside stop back from a camera shop where I gave them the 135mm lens that also came with this camera.  Like me, they assessed it as being worth no money, but were happy to take it and try to sell it for $5 or so to someone who might be in need of it.  I'm hopeful it'll find its way to someone who will appreciate it and put it to good use.  It was in very good shape, just a focal length that was already covered by three of my other lenses on various systems.  

Anyway.  These photos were all shot with the Helios 44.  It was kind of fun shooting the camera with its kit lens.  I didn't trust the light meter at this point, so these were all taken on a sunny day, at f16 and shutter speed 250, for my 200 ASA film.  

These are kind of throwaway shots, because I didn't think the camera worked, and had just run another roll of film through it that came out blank.  I think that first blank roll was user error, somehow.  I'm still not sure what went wrong.  In any case, I did get some images that I enjoy off of this second roll! 

Cropped, straightened, and colors adjusted

 

Cropped very much!  Colors adjusted.

 

Just fixed the alignment here.

Three oil rigs in the distance...

There's definitely something funky happening in most of these photos.  I think most of the issues are due to the back being opened while film was being rewound.  I had rewound more than half of the roll and I don't have much intuition for how long I should be rewinding, having only rewound five entire rolls of film before, this being the fifth.  

The film spool popped up and offered no resistance when turned, and didn't seem to want to go back inside the camera, so I opened up the back.  There was definitely film visible...  So I'm hoping the optical defects and light leaks are a result of that, rather than something with the camera. 

Cropped to be vertically oriented.  I think this might be f11 or f8.

Slightly changed some colors.

Cropped, colors adjusted.  The petals and the bee are very crisp here, this lens is sharp!

An "artistic" light leak over the stop sign.  Colors adjusted.

Colors adjusted.  Taken from the top of a parking garage.

Cropped, colors adjusted.

Pretty much "straight out of camera" -- light issues very apparent here.

Helios 44-2: chasing the swirl

 I got a new (to me) lens!  

And a bonus film camera.  (and two bonus vintage telephoto lenses!)

These Helios 44 lenses are fairly well known for having "swirly" or "twisted" bokeh.  Fortunately, they were mass-produced and are easy to get a hold of for a reasonable price (kind of).  

Notice how there's some weird circular effect going on with the tree?  The in focus seagull isn't distorted, but the out of focus background is.  

 

When researching this lens, I found articles and videos referencing this lens's cheap price -- $30-60 dollars!  Unfortunately, even though those sources are relatively new (within the last five years), prices are not nearly that low anymore.  Ebay listings show people are willing to pay $120-150 (or more!) for these lenses now. 

Thanks to the hype surrounding the swirly bokeh, people have been buying these lenses and driving the price up.  I am now contributing to the problem.  

I have a relatively new copy of the lens (M42 mount, third plant), and supposedly this generation of the Helios 44 has quality control issues.  But mine is in mint condition!  No oil on the aperture blades, the glass is clean and nearly dust free. 

There are actually quite a few variants of this lens, as it was produced for decades in three different manufacturing plants.  There are people more knowlegeable than me on this subject, so you can find other sources if you want to learn more.  It seems like this was a fairly common kit lens on Zenit cameras.  At least for the Zenit E.  My Kalimar SR200 is actually just a Zenit E, with a new name on it for an American customer base.

I was not planning on purchasing a film camera.  I was trying to find a good deal on a perhaps cosmetically flawed but optically functional Helios 44.  It's pretty easy to adapt vintage lenses to a mirrorless system, and my favorite lens for my Fujifilm XT-4 is actually an old Nikon 90mm 1:2 macro lens. 

There are pages and pages of Helios 44 lenses on Ebay.  And on a whim, I added the word "tested" to my search.  That pulled up a listing for a Kalimar SR200 film camera with three lenses, one of which was labeled as a 44mm lens. That lens was in fact the Helios 44, which is (confusingly) a 58mm f2.0 lens.  

The seller had set the price for the camera and three lenses at just under $100.  The photos looked good.  So I purchased everything!  

The other two lenses are both telephoto lenses -- one is a 135mm prime and the other is an 80-200mm zoom lens.  I took them out this morning and wasn't super impressed by them on my Fujifilm XT-4.  

Here's the 135mm telephoto, straight out of camera:

Minimum focus distance isn't bad!  And it's pleasant to use. But it's got "character". 

I think it needs a lens hood.  Or it just has a lot of chromatic aberration naturally.  Colors are okay, sharpness is fine for a vintage lens.  Just not great performance wide open with harsh light (bird photo).  Nothing special. 

Here's the zoom.  I was definitely trying out the "macro" ability, so most of these are at 200mm and minimum focus distance.  I didn't notice that the macro was only 1:5, and minimum focus distance was something like 3 feet.  So I'm not really sold on this lens being macro capable. 

Some halation.  The lens seems kind of soft, but in a pleasing way.  

Really nice background separation!  The background here is very nicely softened.  Colors out of this lens were preferable to the 135mm prime.  I think this tended to be sharper all around, but that's not really my priority with vintage lenses. 

And here's a bonus shot of a bird very rudely flying off while I tried to get a photo. 

I didn't have high hopes for the two other lenses that came with the Helios 44.  And I don't think I'll keep either of them.  I have a Fujinon 100-400mm lens, which is superior in every way to the 80-400mm zoom.  I guess the vintage zoom is much smaller and slightly wider, but when I use the Fujinon, I want the 300-400mm range, the OIS, and the cleaner optics.  

The 135mm prime just doesn't really fill a need for me.  And I don't really like how the images looked out of the camera.  I do very minimal editing, if any, so SOOC image quality is pretty important to me.  

Now on to the lens I definitely will be keeping!  Everything is SOOC again, no cropping, no exposure fixes, etc. 

I'm still trying to figure out how to maximize the swirling.  It doesn't look like it swirls on the camera playback, so I have to bring images back to my computer to see what worked and what didn't. 

I think my lens likes to swirl at f2.8 and not really at f2.0.  

Here the background is swirled, and the foreground just looks kind of mushy.  The lens only swirls the background bokeh:

Very subtle -- I can only see the swirling at the very edges of this image: 

Again, a subtle effect just at the edges:

Here's the lens stopped down to (I think) f8.  My copy of this lens is really, really sharp stopped down.  We get sharpness but no swirling at this aperture. 

Same flower, with a more open aperture (f4?).  Swirls are just starting to appear -- and we have a flying bug of some sort coming in for a landing!  

Another example of how sharp this lens is when stopped down.  The background is also pretty soft and blurry in a pleasing way, just not swirly: 

So while I will be keeping this lens, I am not sure I'll use it only on my Fuji.  I was planning on using it as a walkaround-ish lens for casual use plus some fun swirls, but there are two issues with that.  

The first is the size of the lens on my camera. 

The lens itself is not that large -- but the adapter almost doubles the length of the lens on my XT-4.  

Secondly, the swirl effect is not as pronounced as it could be because I'm using a crop-sensor camera.  Since the swirl is more extreme near the edge of the image, I'm "missing" some of the effect due to the crop sensor in my camera.  

I'm not going to buy a full-frame camera just to get some swirly bokeh!  

However, I do actually already own a full-frame camera.  It's just analog.  35mm film is full frame! 

The Kalimar SR200/Zenit E is a very sturdy camera.  No batteries required.  The light meter in mine seems to work, somehow.  The shutter sound is deafening and powerful.  The camera body is smaller than my XT-4 but somehow weighs just as much.  It's got five entire shutter speeds, plus bulb mode.  You'll need to convert ASA to ГОСТ to use the light meter.  The self-timer on mine works too, and is even louder than the shutter. 

Mine is the commemorative 1980s Olympics edition, which I find kind of funny.  The US boycotted the Olympics that year for... reasons... 

And yet this camera was rebranded into a Kalimar SR200 and sold in the US to an American.  Just hilarious! 

I shot a roll of cheap film to check the camera for light leaks, shutter issues (though it sounds fine), and to check if the light meter works or not.  Hopefully I'll get the scans and negatives back soon!  I'm very curious to see if this camera works.  

In any case, I managed to get the lens I wanted for a fairly low price, and also a pretty cool film camera, regardless of its functionality. 

Shooting on film (but, why?)

Sometimes, doing something the hard way (and for significantly more time and money) is the way to go.  Probably.  

Long story short, film YouTube convinced me to try shooting film.  People were having fun, talked about how different the experience was versus shooting digitally, etc.  I was also really enjoying my instant photo printer (which I wrote about here), which kind of adds an old-school aesthetic to prints.  I did some basic research and found that buying a used film camera off eBay wouldn't actually be too expensive.  So I got one!  The first roll revealed the camera had some pretty significant light leaks: 

 

Even though it's unusable as an image, there's still something about the look that a digital camera and lots of post-processing would struggle to replicate.  

And I "get" film now.  

I get why people are still shooting film, even if it costs nearly $30 for 36 photos (cost of film, development, and scanning).  The experience and result is so fundamentally different. 

I think I've used disposable cameras before, so technically I'm not totally new to film.  Those can still be bought new today.  But I don't think anyone's making new film cameras (other than instant cameras, and a newly-announced/not-yet-released camera by Pentax/Ricoch).  

If you don't have a camera, you have to buy one online or in a thrift store, etc.  I opted for the online route, as none of my local stores had anything suitable (I found some massive vintage zooms lenses, but no camera bodies).  

Since I already have a Fujifilm XT-4, I thought I would get a Fujifilm analog camera, so I could use my same lenses.  And as the new Fujifilm cameras use the X mount, and the old Fujica cameras also use a lens mounting system called the X mount, I figured I could just buy a camera body and use a lens I already have.  

I also wanted a fully-mechanical camera body, and with some very basic research, decided on the STX-2.  I saw that the AX-3 was a fairly comparable option, being mostly mechanical, but found an STX-2 body for a very good price, and fully functional.  So I ordered it!  

And then I found that the X mount for modern digital cameras is actually not the same as the X mount for older Fujifilm cameras.  Terrible naming conventions.  

I went back to eBay and started looking for lenses that would be compatible with the camera.  I found a new-in-box 28mm f2.8 Toyo Optics lens, which was a very cool find.  A long-standing camera store was going out of business, and liquidated their entire stock online.  They had a few other very old, very random bits and ends.  

 

Think the warranty is still good?

I also found an AX-3 being sold "as-is".  But it had the 50mm lens I was trying to find, so I bought the whole thing, just for the lens.  That turned out to be a very, very good thing.  

The STX-2 body that I ordered never showed up.  The tracking did not update, and the seller ended up refunding me.  I think it got lost in the mail.  Still hasn't shown up.  

The AX-3 was a bit dinged up, but fully operational.  Other than the pretty bad light leaks.  I got a light seal foam kit and replaced the ancient, disintegrating foam, which hopefully fixed the issue.  I haven't gotten the test film back yet to see.  

So in the end, I have a single AX-3, plus a 28mm and a 50mm lens.  I think that's a fully functional film camera collection for my needs.  I hope I never get interested in medium or large format or any of the other film-related things that cost the big bucks.  

 

 

The very first shot of the very first roll of film.  Clearly there's some light exposure, and I don't think the focus is quite right.  But I like this image a lot. 

Another image from that first roll.  Light leak is very apparent, again!  

The rest of the photos are about the same.  Light leak, random subjects, missed focus about half the time.  

Shooting the roll was very fun though.  Even though I wasn't sure the camera was working (I could hear the shutter and it appeared the film was winding properly), I found myself taking a lot of time composing shots, considering shutter speed and aperture...  

Considering each shutter press was about a dollar, compared to my near-free shutter presses on my XT-4, of course I was going to take my time!  

I only got 10 actual images from this first roll, actually.  Half the roll was totally burnt out, probably due to the light leak.  So, 10 pictures for $30 is more like $3 per photo, which will add up quickly.  

Even so, I enjoyed the experience, and have since shot three more rolls of film.  Hopefully the light leak is fixed, hopefully the focus is right, hopefully I get some nice images.