In the Garden

Any other year and I’m not usually at home as much to see all the beautiful flowers come out in the garden around this time of year. So I thought I’d make the most of the current situation and head out to the garden with my favourite vintage lens - an old USSR Helios 58mm. This lens has a dream like quality to it, it’s fully manual with a super shallow depth of field and swirly bokeh. which makes it great for shooting flowers and nature.

I managed to pick this lens up from eBay a few years back for £20 and managed to mount it onto my Lumix cameras using a £8 adapter from Amazon and it’s become one of my favourite lenses to shoot with… all for under £30. I’m often asked by people just starting out in photography or just purchasing their first SLR what lenses to get; and whilst I always recommend a decent kit lens (nice and versatile, relatively inexpensive and has a good zoom range), I always say its worth picking up some old manual lenses, such as Canon FD lenses or some old M42 lenses, as not only do you get a great piece of glass for your money (normally £20-£40) but they usually have beautiful characteristics to them that many modern lenses simply do not have, they are built like tanks and they teach you to learn how to manually focus, which is a great skill to have in itself.