u/bjohnh

I tried using a Laowa 1.33x anamorphic adapter on my Holga to see what it would look like. The adapter cost 20 times more than the Holga and weighs about 4 times more. You mount the camera to the adapter, not the other way around. Alignment is tricky because there's no way to look through the lens, but I was able to eyeball it close enough.

It doesn't work so well in 6x6 due to the heavy vignetting, as you can see here; it might work better with the 6x4.5 mask on the Holga and the camera put on its side. It works beautifully with my Diana 151, which takes 4x4 images on 120 film; there's no vignetting and the desqueezed photos are lovely and dreamy.

Anamorphic lenses "squeeze" the images and you have to desqueeze them in post. In the old days this was done in the printing or projection process (anamorphic lenses were and still are mainly used for cinema); for the scans I used a desqueeze app.

As an experiment, I tried using my Diana 151 with an anamorphic adapter. I didn't expect much as it's hard to align the adapter and camera perfectly without being able to look through the lens, but it worked well enough and the effect is cool: it doesn't really look anamorphic but the image is wider (normally the Diana produces 4x4 square photos) and there's extra blurriness and distortion that add to the surreal effect.

The Zeiss C-Sonnar in M-mount is not actually a vintage lens; it's still being made by Cosina, but it's a largely unaltered 1939 design with updated coatings. One of my favourite lenses for portraits (I also use it a lot in concert and dance photography). I mainly use it on my Sony; I also shoot it on film but it has strong focus shift from f2.8 to 5.6 so focus accuracy with a rangefinder can be tricky.

Here are a few example portraits with this lens (on Sony A7iii) from the past few years.

A collection of photos around Montréal taken with my phone, mostly using the Hipstamatic app, over the past couple of years.

The first shot here is on B&W film; the rest are on digital (Sony A7iii, using an M-to-E-mount close-focus helicoid adapter from Voigtländer plus a very thin LTM to M ring adapter). This might be my favourite 35mm lens of all time; the only caveats I can think of are that it's very susceptible to veiling flare and it takes a hard-to-find filter size. I ended up getting an adapter from filterfind.net so I can use Series VI filters and that works well but causes some vignetting wide open. Some people claim the build quality of this lens is mediocre or that it feels fragile but I don't see that at all.

The close-focus helicoid adapter is really useful for digital; like other LTM lenses this one only focuses to about 1 meter but the close-focus helicoid changes that while having a hugely positive effect on the bokeh; you can see it in some of the close-up shots here.

The Canon 35/2 LTM is the successor to this lens and is a bit sharper, has better flare resistance, and is cheaper, but I wanted the extra character of the 1.8 (the 1.5 is unobtainably priced).

All the B&W photos are John S and BlacKeys Supergrain film

Colour photos are Loftus lens and Love 81, Lofton lens and Staccato 05, and Tejas lens and Ina's 1969 film.

When I made my reentry into film a few years ago, the Canon P was the first camera I bought. In retrospect I could have stopped there. I already had some LTM lenses that I was using on digital and wanted to see how they'd look on a camera they were made for. It's my most-used 35mm camera by a long shot; I also have a Leica M2-R but prefer the Canon for many reasons (fits my hand better, can do double exposures, no worries about burning holes in a cloth shutter if I point it toward the sun with the aperture wide open, etc.).

Developed in 510 pyro for 28 minutes.

All photos taken on iPhone SE with Hipstamatic Classic. B&W taken with John S + BlacKeys XF; colour mainly with the Cinematic preset.

Mostly shot on iPhone SE, many using the double exposure feature.