Lots of good tips there. For combatting glare with these old film-era beauties, a cheapo lens hood from EBay will help overcome that. (The hood might show in the edges of a wider lens but you can usually crop it out afterwards). Get a hood which screws into the filter thread rather than an original one.
previous comment is very true, a good lens hood makes tremendous difference, i use them on all my soviet lenses. about the light sources in the frame - i got a few little jobs to shoot concerts recently and was very surprised after risked to use helios-44m and jupiter-37a against the extreme stage lights. yes, the contrast was lost, but sharpness remained good, nothing happened that postprocessing could't fix, except of course when massive light beams hit the lense directly, but this would be disaster for modern glass as well.
That is surprising, but makes sense - I know what you mean in saying that sharpness is retained, very often you do still get that resolution even if there's a flare in front of it.
