It wasn’t until 1958 that it was rebranded! It’s easy to think that a bag full of lenses is a good thing — hell, there’s one for nearly every possible use. You should also know that uncoated lenses are prone to flare when shooting against the light. But what exactly is the perfect lens? Should You Buy a Vintage Lens? At f0.95, it laughs at low-light conditions; ISO is a passing thought. Consider This: Many a photographer regards the 50mm lens as a normal focal length because it mimics the vision of the human eye. It does not suffer from flaring and is very controlled which I think is down to that F3.5 aputure, not like the Helios 58mm or the Jupiter 85mm lens we have. Here, we present five of the best 35mm lens offerings available today that aren’t Canon, Nikon or Sony. 14 Lightweight and Breathable Summer Face Masks, This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. This luxurious vintage piece gives a specific luminous rounded look to images and it really produces amazing bokeh, especially at f/4-5.6. It can produce sharp, contrasty, three-dimensional like images all in a small package. That’s Sigma. We shoot everything on a Sony A7s Mark 1 in 1080p. This superb lens even has a floating rear element to suppress distortion. We do this because 35mm on a full frame is quite wide, and when you start to get close to your actor, the shape of there face will look little wider and start to look unnatural. Walkaround Guys: 5 Best Everyday Kit Lenses, Tiny Titans: 5 Best Enthusiast Compact Cameras, Don’t Overpay for Contact Lenses; There Is a Better Way. We have to do this with all of our vintage lens. One of the reasons? This lens was originally made by the former East German branch of Zeiss and it has either Exakta or M42 screw mount. Though their 35mm f2 is more highly regarded for its combination of “low cost” and quality, Leica recently refreshed their 35mm f1.4. This lens is surprisingly sharp and it has a wonderful bokeh at wide apertures. For us, this is one of the characters of the lens that we really like and embrace. Best 35mm Lens Replacement: Remember the awkward girl from high school who blossomed into a total fox? There are also two mounts available – M42 and K mount. It’s one of the fastest M42 prime lenses, it’s very compact and it has a solid metal construction. Also, the lens is optimized to be its sharpest wide open at f1.4, so get ready to shoot parties with low ISOs and without flash. I might still be using it when I’m 80 years old. This lens is nearly 50 years old and it is one of our favourites which we use all of the time to shoot videos for this channel and also our short film. This exceptional medium telephoto lens first appeared under the Serenar name in silver finish in 1953. Its optical quality is superb! This legendary lens is one of Minolta’s most popular manual focus lenses. It is a 6-element Double-Gauss lens based on Zeiss Biotar design and it’s usually found in M42 mount. One of the few companies that acknowledges this is Pentax — and they’ve been designing 43mm lenses for years. Best 35mm Lens for the Darkness Conqueror: The f0.95 lens is something of a magical beast in the photo world — think of Falkor the Luckdragon meeting a unicorn and having beautiful babies. Old lenses often have fungus in the glass as well as various scratches or minor blemishes in the coating. This high-end lens has 9 aperture blades (compared with 7 aperture blades of mid-grade lenses) and it creates an interesting super creamy bokeh that appeals to many vintage lens collectors. Ergonomics of this lens are great as well – it offers an easy focus and easy aperture setting. The Helios 85mm f1.5 was initially very popular in the filmmaker community and it became well-known among photographers only a few years ago. Even though this is quite a heavy lens (it’s f1.2 after all!) Many photographers use it with Leica M9 nowadays. If you can, test them before you buy them. Pentax Super-Takumar 35mm f/3.5 – $72-$94 on KEH. (Note: this lens only works on Leica and mirrorless cameras.). Super-Takumar is certainly no exception – it produces a gorgeous bokeh and vivid colors along with impressive sharpness even at widest apertures. Time for a science lesson. It was introduced in the late 1960s and it remained a favorite of many photographers.