As a photography enthusiast, I wanted to try portrait photography, which usually involves a portrait lens. Portrait lenses give you depth of field — they blur the background and focus sharply on the subject. This effect is called bokeh, and how much of it you get depends on the aperture of the lens. The wider the aperture, the greater the blur. Portrait lenses are expensive; some cost more than the camera body itself. So I started looking for something cheap enough to fit my budget, and stumbled onto vintage lenses.
Exploring further, one name kept coming up: Helios. It was famous for swirly bokeh — elliptical rather than the usual circular shape near the edges of the frame — caused by an imperfection in the lens itself. It was produced from 1959 to 1999, and currently sells on eBay for $25–$75. I bought a Helios-44 58mm f/2.0 from an American seller who posted the ad in French and asked me to pay in Euros. The lens, along with the M42 mount that bridges it to my camera, was shipped from Kiev, Ukraine.
Because it is all optics and metal with no electronics, everything is manual — manual focus, manual aperture. I was amazed by what it could capture on a digital body. The images have a dreamy quality to them. Which made me want to know where this thing came from.
Reading the serial number
A little googling turned up that both the age of a Helios and the factory that made it can be read off the serial number and the symbol stamped on the barrel. Mine was 84xxxxxx — manufactured in 1984, two years before Chernobyl — and carried the mark of Jupiter Optics Valdai, USSR. The lens was almost twice my age.
German DNA
Though made in the USSR, the lens is German underneath. Its formula is believed to resemble the Carl Zeiss Biotar. After WWII, East Germany — where the Carl Zeiss Jena plant was located — came under Soviet control, and Dr. Willy Walter Merte's successful 1936 Zeiss formula was taken and used to build the Helios. Production started in 1959, and while the lenses were altered over the decades, the optical formula stayed largely the same.
So why did the Helios become famous when the Biotar already existed? Volume. Helios lenses were made for Zenit cameras and mass-produced under Soviet rule across three factories — KMZ, MMZ and JOV. It is believed to be the most produced lens in the world, used for military, surveillance and civilian photography alike.
The serial numbers encode more than dates. Numbers beginning 000xxxxx were the
main prototypes; 00xxxxx went to communist officials; 0xxxxxx went to factory
personnel. The ones starting with a zero are thought to be better than the rest —
they were built for people who would notice.
The lens has its own stories
The lens that helps me tell many stories has a story of its own. Now, whenever I see it mounted on my camera, I think about where it has been since the Cold War — the previous owners, the photographs already taken with it, the places it travelled before it reached me.
Thanks to eBay, Ukrainian Post, Indian Post, and the people of the internet who documented all of this. The photographs in this article were shot on the Helios and are my own.