Welcome to VintageLensesForVideo!
This website was born when my interest in vintage lenses turned into a passion! I decided to give my research, tests and reviews their own, dedicated space!
Team Work!
While VLFV might sometimes appear as a personal blog, there are some people who this website couldn’t exist without, namely my lovely wife Yana, who is fully involved in the creation of most videos I share on this website, from modelling in front of the camera to coming up with ideas, directing and even editing the final videos! I also try to share guest posts and reviews as often as I can to make sure VLFV offers a view from as many knowledgeable people as possible!
Why Vintage Lenses?
What excites me the most in my research of vintage lenses is the discovery of forgotten, hidden gems that are not popular nowadays, but still offer great results. There are literally 1000s of different, very interesting vintage lenses out there, most of which offer a lot of benefits for VIDEO USE over most modern lenses!
The common advantages:
- Smooth, long through focus ring, often with over 300 degrees of rotation. Unlike a lot of modern lenses, which are primarily designed for fast auto-focusing and usually have quite a short focus through, vintage lenses were designed for manual focusing! On top of that manual lenses always have hard stops at each end of the focusing range, unlike lenses like Canon EF lenses, which keep spinning even after you reach the end of the focusing range, messing up any follow focus marks that you might have on your follow focus.
- Mechanical Aperture adjustment on the actual lens. Unlike most modern lenses which are controlled electronically via the camera, older photo lenses have manual aperture adjustment, meaning the lens can be used with just about any camera it will physically fit to. On top of that, some of these lenses have step-less aperture adjustment, just like on the Cine lenses!
- Amazing build quality. Most of the older photo lenses have a solid, metal construction that lasts for decades, unlike a lot of modern plasticky lenses.
- Unique optical performance. Vintage lenses often have a more “film-like” character with very interesting bokeh and amazing flares like on the legendary Helios 44-2 lens, which is a great representation of a vintage lens: long focusing through, step-less aperture adjustment, best lens flares I have ever seen from a photo lens.
- They offer amazing value for money comparing to modern lenses! The difference in the price is enormous, but the image quality that can be achieved with a $$$$ lens can often be very closely matched by a $20-$30 lens if used to its full potential. Not all vintage lenses are good. A lot of them have poor sharpness & contrast, a lot of chromatic aberration and vignetting, but so do the modern low-end lenses that still cost more than a good vintage lens.
Mission!
My challenge is to discover cheap, but great lenses that offer amazing value for money. I want people to realise that you don’t have to spend thousands to have a nice set of relatively fast, sharp lenses. As long as you know what to get, you don’t have to pay more than 1/5th and sometimes even 1/10th of the modern lens price to get a nice, quality lens. My goal is to help you save money and achieve great results. I will of course also test and review unique (and probably expensive) vintage cine lenses that you might turn out to be exactly what you want to rent for your next film
I would like to invite you to join me on my journey to discover amazing various lenses! Along the way I will be giving away some of the lenses from my collection, so make sure to bookmark www.vintagelensesforvideo.com and check back once in a while!
