What better time than autumn for some “vintage” glass? Reading Jonas Rask’s latest blog post about a new lens — always a treat — inspired me to dig out my Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm ƒ/2.8 ‘Zebra’ and again take it for a spin.
Holy halation, Batman! Definitely this glass makes some things glow, oftentimes with added, fun bokeh.
Technical stuff: This Zeiss Tessar is an M42 screw-mount lens, which means I need to use it with an adapter for my Fuji X cameras. The adapter I’ve picked up, based on recommendations from Rask and others, is a Zhongyi Lens Turbo II (M42-FX), which has the added benefit of serving as a focal reducer. So instead of the 1.5x focal change for mounting a lens on an APS-C camera such as the Fuji X series — making a 50mm lens focal length 75mm — the Zhongyi keeps things much closer to the original.
