It's still a ridiculous lens

It's a Arsat 80mm f2.8 lens.  Intended for use with the the Kiev 60, a colossal Russian tank of a camera, a medium format SLR.



It's attached via a Harblei Tilt Adapter to a Minolta X-GM 35mm SLR, a camera popular in the early '80's.



It's bent.

And it's still ridiculous.

Perhaps it's time for a review of photos taken with the ridiculous lens since I last wrote about it in 2010.

But first a little review.  A lens normal (perpendicular) to the film or digital sensor shot wide open isolates focus to a plane a certain distance away from the photographer. 

If you take your camera bowling, then the shot might looks something like this


shot wide open with a f1.2 35mm m-mount Cosina Voightlander Nokton.

 or passing the time before the public is let into the bout venue, then the shot might look like this

  shot wide open with a f1.4 21mm m-mount Leica Summilux

Sure, it's easy enough to shoot wide open if you're taking photos of stationary subjects like flowers, but what if your subject is jumping around? Then the shot might look like this

shot wide open with a f1.2 60mm m-mount Konica Hexanon

But if you're shooting roller derby, the primary subject rolls from out of focus to into focus and back out of focus again (if you're shooting with manual focus lenses like me... which you're probably aren't)

  shot wide open with a f2 90mm m-mount Leica Summicron

But, if you're shooting with a ridiculous lens, then the plane of focus is tilted just like then lens is... which makes it hard to find the subject in focus.







 
































As I said in 2010,

"If however your subject matter requires a bit more nimbleness such as sports photography or "street photography" (taking photos of people you don't know in public places) a tilt lens is probably one of the craziest tools you could use for these subjects. Occasionally, I get interesting photographs, sometimes even a gem, but most of the time it's just crazy."