KMZ Helios-40 85mm f/1.5

Put a Jupiter-9 next to a Helios-40 and the Jupiter looks like the sensible buy. It is the Sonnar-type 85mm f/2, small enough to stay on a camera all day and cheap enough to shrug off. The Helios-40 is only a little faster at f/1.5, and it weighs somewhere between 940 and 1,090 grams of solid metal, depending on the copy. Early ones even have a tripod socket built into the barrel. Most people who carry the heavy one anyway do it for the way it draws what sits behind the subject.

Wide open the image glows. Contrast is low, the centre holds together and the corners don't. Put foliage or point lights a fair distance behind your sitter and the out-of-focus highlights stretch into a circular swirl that wraps around the frame, strongest at f/1.5. Stop down to f/2.8 and the swirl settles, contrast picks up and the centre turns properly sharp. By f/5.6 it is a capable, unremarkable 85mm. The huge front element picks up stray light easily, so shooting into a low sun without a deep hood fills the frame with haze.

On paper it is a Soviet Biotar. D.S. Volosov computed the Helios-40 from the Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm f/1.5, a double-Gauss of six elements in four groups, and gave it ten aperture blades. KMZ started production in 1956 and reported making just 50 lenses that year. This silver original is threaded for the Zenit M39 mount with its 45.2mm flange. It shares the 39mm diameter with Leica screw lenses, but the thread pitch and the much deeper flange differ, so it will not fit or focus on a Leica-thread rangefinder. The diaphragm is a two-ring preset: set the taking aperture on one ring, focus at full aperture, then turn the second ring down to that stop just before you fire.

Portrait shooters buy it for the swirl, usually for tight headshots or a figure backlit against trees, and most of them learn that the effect wears thin when every frame carries it. Living with the lens is harder than admiring its pictures. A kilogram hanging off a thread mount is awkward to hold steady, and the preset routine slows you down whenever the subject moves. Then there is the filter thread, an odd 66mm, so you will need a step-up ring before any standard filter fits.

In his March 2024 review, Phillip Reeve put used prices at roughly $250 to $460, well above what a clean Jupiter-9 costs. For a lens you mount every week, the Jupiter wins. The Helios-40 earns its price on the frames you can pick out of a contact sheet at a glance, which is why it keeps getting adapted to mirrorless bodies decades after its Zenit bodies wore out.

The exposure problem is shooting it wide open in daylight. At ISO 100 under Sunny 16, f/1.5 asks for a shutter speed far beyond the 1/500 top speed of an old Zenit. You need close to five stops of neutral density on that 66mm thread. Enter the filter factor in Zone Light Meter and it shifts the reading for you, which keeps you from overexposing the frames where the swirl looks best.