Great review! I forgot about macro tubes, need to order some now. I Added one of these lenses to my kit a couple years ago. Definitely fun to use for specific macro-esque video shots
Nice review as always! Have you tried mounting some of the other soviet lenses in your collection in reverse to make them work like macro lenses? Yesterday I tried that out with my helios lens and a 28mm Tokina and got great results! Although you need to push the pin down to set the aperture somehow and you can only focus by moving to or away from the target. I mounted the lenses by taping them to the m42 adapter on my camera, so I had a very messy and at first also unsafe solution for mounting my lenses in reverse. The results can be very interesting though and I noticed that especially on the 28mm you could go very up close, but focusing is very difficult sadly. For the aperture, I think I might just mount another small adapter I have to the m42 mount to push the pin down. That might work out 🤔
Thanks for watching! I actually haven't tried doing reverse-mounting, aside from the Industar-61 and Volna-9 - to be honest, I don't really shoot much macro so don't often have the need to, but I can imagine it would be fun to play around with. My main issue with reverse mounting is the exact same as you've pointed out there though, losing the ability to focus, pretty much at all, is kind of annoying.
@@SovietLensReviews that is true, a reverse mounted lens has limited viability which is too bad. Focusing by moving the camera on the tripod also is quite difficult and fiddly at times. But nevertheless, kind of bad to use macro is better than no macro at all due to budget restraints 😁
Great videos mate. For me, it’s going to be hard to match the Micro-Nikkor 60mm f2.8, even adapted, considering the relatively small price difference at the moment. But if you have no macro lens at all seems like a decent option for M42.
Six elements in four groups are a very classic Macro Lens Design, fx the Contax Zeiss Macro-Planar 60mm 2.8. I prefer a Macro Lens to be 60mm focal length or longer.
It's actually a Paint.Net C# plugin I wrote (I do a bit of post-processing software dev on the side). If there's enough interest, I could release it, but it's not particularly flashy, just spits out a number to a text file.
@@SovietLensReviews ah wow! Yeah release it man :D None of the results really matter in the end, but even so i like to know. Especially since I have a few of the same lens and each one seems slightly different. Be good to put a number to em haha.
I'm not sure why you dislike the bokeh from the Volna-9. I was able to achieve wonderful bokeh with this lens & I find it to be one of the strengths of this lens.
Now that I'm a bit more familiar with it, it's super convenient. Once you've got it setup, barely have to touch it/think about it, which is what I like. In this vid, I used the raw audio from the recorder, to avoid the Z6's dodgy preamps.
It's a funny lens like that, does some things really well! I'd personally trade the aperture preset system for a nice clicky aperture if I could though, no questions asked.
Volna can focus much closer. The industar is perhaps harsher. I prefer Volna for video. It makes nice psychedelic flares when shot against the light. Volna is my favorite vintage lens. Okay. I have to say that I am a beginner, but I have several older lenses, so I am comparing. Both lenses make stars in the bouque..