The messy political conclusion to World War II had an interesting and beneficial impact for photographers. With four nations occupying the ruins of Germany, each country quietly began attempts to loot the decimated Nazi empire of all its valuable scientists and technology. While the majority of their efforts were focused on trying to capture high-value German military scientists in the field of rocketry, aeronautics and nuclear research, there was also a campaign of direct seizures of German commercial designs, industrial trade secrets and manufacturing equipment.
The Soviets, having overrun a Carl Zeiss factory in Jenna, claimed the existing designs and tooling to all the pre-war Zeiss optics as war reparations and began manufacturing copies of Zeiss lenses and rangefinders at their own factories, Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod in Krasnogorsk just outside of Moscow and Zavod Arsenal in Kiev, Ukrane. While the quality control and finish details of Soviet manufacturing were far below the German Zeiss standard, the Zenitar and Kiev photographic lines they turned out eventually found a secondary market in the west with quirky and adventurous photographers.
Although these quirky Russian cameras and lenses are mostly celebrated for the medium format offerings of the Kiev line, the Zenitar Fish-eye lens has become an affordable curiosity in the 35mm world for those that can overlook its faults. Despite all it’s frustrating qualities, it has slowly become a regular element in my photography thanks to a specific method of shooting I’ve developed to mitigate all its faults.
The MC Zenitar 16mm fish-eye lens is a full-frame fisheye, but unlike traditional fish-eye lenses that produce a circular 180° image within the frame, the Zenitar is a rectilinear fish-eye lens that fills the entire 35mm frame from edge to edge. The aperture range extends from a maximum of f/2.8 all the way to a minimum of f/22, with neither extreme being photographically ideal. The lens is fully manual, with hard aperture stops that operate in full stop-down mode throughout the range.
The Zenitar is capable of producing some really interesting shots at a very affordable price, but rather then detail the pros of the Zeniter, I figured I should just get down to brass tacks and tell you all the things that are terrible with this lens.
As with all russian-made optics, there are many variations in Zenitar copies in both build quality and camera mount adapter. Some Zenitars ship with an M42 mount and adapter to fit your particular camera. While these lenses are becoming more rare, the internets are scattered with stories about Zenitars that extend so deep into the camera body that the mirror actually strikes the back of the lens when firing the shutter. More recent copies of the Zenitar are fitted with the particular lens mount screwed directly to the lens body instead of using an M42/camera mount adapter which eliminates the mirror strike problem.
Regarding build quality, some Zenitars come perfectly clean and smooth in operation while others will feel gritty and may even show evidence of metal filings stuck in the optical path. As they are sold mainly via eBay and random internet stores, it is unlikely that you will be able to test out several copies in order to pick the best of the litter, thus purchasing a Zenitar is somewhat of a leap of faith. That being said, the sticker price hovers right around $200 in most cases so if you manage to get a copy that is quite subpar, you won’t be out a tremendous investment and you may even be able to reclaim a large portion of that purchase price by posting it back on eBay.
My EF mount Zenitar arrived with the focus scale out of wack and the front hood was oddly tilted to the side. After reading this post, I discovered that by pulling back the rubber band around the focus barrell, you can access the screws that will allow you to realign the front hood and recalibrate the focusing scale. Although I spent several hours attempting to properly calibrate the focus scale, I’ve never been able to nail down infinity correctly which leads me to believe that I have an issue with flange depth on my particular lens/mount combination. When I have more time, I will use Aperture’s tethered shooting mode to try to calibrate this once and for all.
Being a fully manual mechanical lens, there are no motors for autofocus and no electronics to relay aperture data to a DSLR. In order to use a Zenitar on a Canon EF body, you’re stuck using either fully Manual or Av mode while stopping down the lens manually. Real world operation becomes even more tricky due to the extreme wide angle nature of this lens which when combined with the Digital Rebel XT’s tiny viewfinder, makes almost everything seem to be in focus no matter how far off it is.
Furthermore, attaching the lens to a cropped sensor DSLR like the Rebel series basically changes the lens from a full-frame fisheye to a normal wide-angle lens with extreme barrel distortion. The resulting images aren’t distorted enough to be immediately identified as a fish-eye shot, yet are also not optically flat enough to look like a normal wide-angle shot. On a cropped sensor, the Zenitar falls between two odd extremes that greatly limit its potential uses.
Finally, to round out the negatives, the lens ships with a useless front lens cap and a crappy nylon storage bag. Any slight bump of the cap will cause it to either fall off completely, or grind it into the front element of the lens, eventually resulting in numerous scratches of the front surface and lens-flare coating. My copy, having seen a lot of time at the front of my camera body, now has numerous physical imperfections on the front element directly related to the incredibly poor design of the lens cap.
So now that I’ve detailed what a hunk of crap this lens is, I will write my next post on the technique I developed to circumvent its numerous faults and why it has become one of my favorite tools.
In the meantime, enjoy these blogs further detailing the Zenitar: