13-Dec-2023
How to take velvety bokeh flower photos with retro M42 lenses
Flower photos with deep velvety out-of-focus areas (bokeh) look very beautiful. However, if you try to take one with your sharp hi-tech digital-era lenses, you may not get the desired effect. The technologies that make your lenses pin sharp and aberrations-free also make the bokeh (non-focus areas) harsher and much less pretty. That is unfortunately also true with your modern macro lenses. There are some products called "velvety" macro lenses that flower photographers use to overcome that and give a more pleasant look to their bokehfull flower photos. Of course, those come with a price and are limited in their usage. But in this article, I will tell you a much better alternative: using retro m42 lenses for photographing flowers with stunning bokeh effects!
How to use M42 lenses for flower macros
To be able to use them in your digital camera, you need an m42 adapter suitable for your camera plus m42 extension rings. You can check my other blog post here to see how you can choose an M42 adapter for your cameras. The extension rings will allow you to get closer to flowers for macro photography. You will be installing the adapter to your camera, and use extension rings to get closeup pictures. If you have extension rings for your camera already, you can also use the adapter on top of them instead. Nikon users should use adapters without correction glass, the body will give extra magnification and you will be eliminating the side effects using a glass adapter.
If you don't use the extension rings, the minimum focusing distance you will get will not be enough for flower photography. Then it is the minimum distance written on your lens, on average 50 cm for a 50mm lens. There are quite some good retro m42 extension rings made in time and you are lucky if you can find a second-hand Takumar or Zenit one being amongst the best quality ones.
If you cannot find one of these retro ones, or like to buy a new one, there are these Zenit copy extension rings available on websites like eBay or Aliexpress for quite low prices. Do these work as well as retro ones? Of course not..
These rings have the same paint on their interior as their exterior. Which means the interior is also shiny. This is a problem with any kind of photography because the shiny layer will create and amplify inner reflections, making halos and haze in your images. So basically they are unusable as they are sold. However, there is a remedy.
You need to find a black craft sheet with a matte layer to cut inner pieces for your extension rings and glue them inside as shown below. Is that enough? well.. you should also make small paper aperture rings to cover-shrink the opening on each of them. Only after that, you are good to go and use them as macro extension rings without the halo problems.
Which lenses to use
You have many options with a variety of different bokeh effects on each using retro m42 lenses in your flower photography. The focal length you choose should be around the standard 55mm and not on the extremes like 300-400mm. Personally, I like the effects from the Yashica Yashinon 50mm f1.7 lens the most, and the Pentax Takumar 55mm f2 lens the second.
Zenit lenses like Helios 44M and Jupiter 9 80mm have also unique painterly bokeh effects:
Some m42 lenses that normally give quite nice bokeh, like the bokeh champion Pentacon 50mm f1.8 lens and Mamiya lenses performed very poorly in my tests giving unusable results. So do not expect to get a nice effect on every m42 lens and test it for yourself first to see if they work for you.
That's it, I hope you enjoy taking velvety bokeh flower photos with retro m42 lenses.