The Helios 44 Project 1.1: Preamble + “Friends Forever” short

I’ve been posting images and short video clips on Instagram for an irregular series – the first effort being #urbannonsense, followed by #planttails, and #officenonsense – but for the overwhelming bulk of 2025, I’ve been using a vintage Soviet era lens, the popular Helios 44-2, which is best known for its ‘swirly boke’ effects, warm colours, and soft analogue image.

It’s only in the last 5-odd years that I’ve been getting into both photography and videography, and as ridiculous as it sounds, it’s only been 2 years since I started using a Helios 44-2 58mm – very popular on Instagram – that I bought on a whim, and kept in a box for 5+ years, awaiting future use when I could get the right lens mount adapter and a DSLR camera.

I’ve always liked wide angle lenses – partly due to them broadening the visual scope of vintage tube and CCD video cameras that often came with very basic zoom lenses with macro features – so using a 58mm lens that’s popular for portraiture has been a unique (and ongoing) learning experience.

The Helios’ close-up range of 1.7 ft is limited, especially when compared to the wide lens I was using pretty regularly, a Pentax 14mm in conjunction with a Pentax K5 DSLR camera from 2010 (graciously on loan from @sylvianowak), and can go as close as .56 ft, and get ridiculously fine details of a subject.

Compared to the Pentax 14mm, the Helios 44-2 is more challenging, and initially, kind of a pain in the ass. You have to walk back a distance to get a decent medium wide shot; you need to be very accurate to avoid unwanted soft areas and blur on the main subject; and for filming, trying to follow focus is especially tough because of the lens’ weird design – the aperture setting is at the front of the lens, and the focus is very close to the camera body.

From a photographic stance, it’s not that big of an issue – certainly with the Pentax K5 and K10D cameras, the stills and video have lovely colours and details – but for videography / film use, it’s easy to see why the Helios is re-housed in a larger body, with smoother focus rings and extending lever. But there is one big benefit that at least with the Pentax K5, is wonderful – something I’ll get into shortly.

A quick background on why this lens is so beloved by photographers:

The Helios-branded 58mm is a copy of the German Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm, and this specific Soviet model was reportedly the most produced lens in history. Made from 1958 to the 1999, there are reportedly 8 iterations (44 being the first; 44-2 the revised second, and so on into the M-series which later switched to plastic bodies) which were made at different plants, and connoisseurs and experts have notes differences in the lens coating and build quality.

As Pav SZ recounts in his concise primer video, no two Helios 44-2’s are exactly the same, and “You won’t find perfection in any of them.” This is actually a good thing to my eyes, because the lack of precision means that not unlike audio and video feedback and glitching with mixers and eccentric gear, you have to find that sweet spot; with the Helios 44-2, there’s the lens’ distance from a subject, the subject’s distance from backgrounds (like foliage), lighting, and aperture and shutter settings.

It also means that even after using the lens for a year, you’ll experience a mix of wonder & delight, and frustration & annoyances. And with video, it can be a bit more complicated.

Over the spring and summer, I’ve been gathering footage for stock use, as well as several shorts – one of which accompanies this piece – and I’ve stuck with the Helios not just because of the attractive boke, crazy lens flares, and striking blurry curvy backgrounds, but because I want to find the realms where a 58mm offers a striking variety of imagery over its bigger wide and tele competitors. To make the lens work for me, I have to figure out its limits and benefits, and find subjects that it likes, and distinguish the results from its sexier rivals – all while developing and exploiting my own visual fixations (like shadows, foliage, angular / orbital / twirling spaceship lens flares), and eccentric angles).

My Helios 44-2 also has some flaws: a nick on the outer lens, dirt between the inner lenses, a slightly vertically wiggly aperture ring, and that chunky focus ring which doesn’t always come to a smooth stop. I’ll likely attempt to clean the inner lenses, but since it requires cracking the Helios open into fine parts, I’ll do it when I find a second 44-2 with (hopefully) the same performance. You know: insurance, in the event of mucking things up.

I’ll cover the lens’ flaws at a later point, but for the curious and some context, my current photography and select videography is highlighted on my own Instagram channel @markrhasan, with anything related to video production showcased at @bigheadamusements.

Before I get to the short video tied to this blog, a few quick facts: the Pentax K5 I use can shoot HD video – 720p at 25fps and 30fps, as well as 1080p at 25fps – but I tend to stick with 720p at 30fps because 1) the Pentax overheats when filming, especially on warm days under direct hot sunlight; 2) it can lose frames under more severe conditions; and 3) for the current spate of tests and projects at the moment, 720p is fine – and still looks fine when upconverted to 1080p via Adobe’s Media Encoder.

There are many YouTube videos demonstrating the capabilities of the Helios 44-2 in assorted test clips, and the lens has been used in several Hollywood projects in a cine housing – The Batman (2022) and Dune: Part 2 (2024) being the most recent examples – but alongside background templates, I also want to test it out in short narrative works, of which the lighthearted “Friends Forever” is the first:

Filming footage for the sunset was cold, and the final results were meh, largely because the cloudage and angle of the descending sun wasn’t in that sweet spot that yields robust red-organge-violet-purple hues, but the end results in the short are the equivalent to making lemonade from lemons, and still provide examples of the colour, detail, and compositional opportunities with the Helios 44-2.

Thanks for reading,

Mark R. Hasan
Publisher, BHA+ / Big Head Amusements