May
Selling and searching on eBay I was contacted by Aleksandr Limberg, as he wanted to buy a Tamron autofocus lens from me. We started to negotiate and he told me the needed the helicoid to transform vintage lenses from the 50’s and 60’s to autofocus. I was very surprised an we started talking. He told me that he could use the barrel with the autofocus part of the lens and combine it with most sought after prime lenses with the excellent Bokeh. He made these lenses first for himself and later on he made some to sell. You can find his work on eBay
Aleksandr Limberg is born in Estonia in the 70’s, than it was still the USSR. He had found photography and made it an hobby of his. He made pictures developed and printed himself an once in a while he had an exhibition. Later on in life he moved to Italy where he is stil residing. Photography as a hobby interested him more and more and than when digital camera’s came about, he wanted to use the nice old lenses he was used to on his new digital camera. He than started experimenting wit autofocus lenses and taking them apart an fixing them but found one that had bad glass, he thought why not replace that with the glass of one of my older good lenses. So the concept of autofocus Bokeh was born.
Over the years he perfected his work and has replaced a lot of lenses and merged them to autofocus helicoids. Among the lenses he merged are Meyer-Optik Gorlitz 200mm f4 ,Leitz Wetzlar Dimaron 100mm f2.8, Super-Dynarex F4 135mm, ISCO PROJAR GOTTINGEN 85mm f2.8 and some Helios lenses. So this man is a genius in lens adapting. He is no stranger to the quality lenses made for projection that create the Bokeh we all came to love.
You can see his work on eBay and have a look at his youtubechannel to see how he made them and what the results are
If you like the lenses he made have a look at his little shop on eBay and maybe you could do business with him.
Here are some examples of photo’s made with the lenses he converted, with a selfportret of the master himself. You can see the excellent swirly Bokeh most of us came to like in lenses made un till the late sixties, and also seen in major projection lenses used by Leica/Leitz and other big projector manufacturers. to learn more about bokeh you can take a look at this website : https://phlearn.com/magazine/bokeh-photography-the-ultimate-tutorial
Copyright for all the Images is Aleksandr Limberg.
Edwin Molenaar