the evenings out here - Thoughts, rants and musings about absolutely everything except photography. Or cats.

From Russia with love

albeit somewhat overdue

in Product reviews , Saturday, April 27, 2013

Well, well, look what DHL dropped off yesterday. A brand new Lomography Belair “Belairgon” 114mm lens, apparently hand machined from a solid block of aluminium by Zenith in Russia.

The packaging is quite impressive, and the lens is built like, well, something Russian. It’s quite hefty, and apart from back lens cap, which is standard Lomography low grade plastic sh*t, generally it gives a good impression. Very firm but fluid movement, well put together. Unfortunately, the companion viewfinder is of the same type as the standard Belair lenses, so absolutely hopeless. Actually, it’s worse, as for some incomprehensible reasons the hipster designers have coloured it some virulent shade of orangey-red on the inside, which reflects in the (dim and blurry) view. Awesome.

So, first impressions, without having actually used it yet, are of a lens built to a standard way above the body it fits on to. Next step will be to see if it can actually rescue the Belair by delivering some decent photos.

Personally I find “Zenith. Russia” far sexier than “Lomography”....

The focus scale is far more useful than the one on the plastic lenses. Due to the Belair design, there are only 2 aperture settings, f/8 and f/16, which is fairly useless. Coupled with the lack of any manual exposure setting, there is a strong element of chance with any Belair shot, which I suppose is what “lomography” is all about. But “spray and pray” gets pretty expensive when you’re dealing with 120 format film.

Posted in Product reviews on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 03:07 PM • Permalink • Comments (3)

3 comments

Project Hyakumeizan April 27, 2013 - 6:33
Embrace the random; and the unsharp ....

3 comments

Marty May 19, 2013 - 5:39
Do you have any results from the glass lens yet? I was so disgusted with the quality of the plastic lenses that I installed a pinhole lens instead, and am very happy with the results. Pinhole photography is truly magic if you like impressionistic art. If the glass lenses are good quality, I'm willing to invest in one, but probably not two.

3 comments

David Mantripp May 21, 2013 - 10:46
Hi Marty, I have some results (over 40 exposures in fact) and I'll post some soon. In a nutshell, it is much better, and probably, in the right circumstances and with careful technique you could get fairly good results out of it, although still a bit short of the Lomography hype. The problem is that there is almost no way you could get good results handheld with an f8 lens and maximum exposure of 1/125th, even before adding in the issue of very approximate focusing. The camera body design just works against it. Even on a tripod, the shutter release on the lens board makes things pretty unstable. Ok, none of these things may be issues for the Lomo look, but I really can't see why bother going with the trouble and expense of 120 roll film in that case. It makes much more sense with 35mm. I haven't had a lot of experience with pinhole, but I would imagine that even there, unless you going for a VERY impressionistic, indeed gothic look, or maybe you're using 3200 ISO film, then 1/125th is going to be a bit of a showstopper.

I'm struggling to find good things to say about the Belair. It is sort of fun to use, but the results don't live up to expectation. It's neither one thing nor the other - too "straight" for Lomography, too "lomo" for straight photography. The Belairgon lens, however, I think is pretty good value for money. If only there were a camera worth attaching it too.

Hmm. I wonder if one could contrive a Belairgon to XPan adaptor 😊