Cascais Beach / Vintage Lenses / Minolta MD Varisoft 85mm F2.8 + GFX50s2 + Xpan mode

Yesterday, I suddenly felt inspired and realized that the weather in the afternoon was really good. Although the area near Lisbon was cloudy and overcast, the weather near Cascais was sunny and cloudless. So I went to the beach for a walk and took some photos. This time, I brought an 85mm lens with an equivalent focal length of about 66mm to shoot the pedestrians on the beach, and the result was excellent. The Cascais beach starts from the train station and has a beach path that stretches for more than ten kilometres, with beaches of different sizes. However, during peak season, the crowds are crowded and unsuitable for shooting. Conversely, now is the off-season, and fewer tourists make capturing people much easier for composition space and shooting distance.

The MD 85 Soft is not an easy-to-use lens. You must use the maximum aperture of F2.8 and have sunny weather to bring out the soft focus effect. Although there are three soft focus effects to choose from, in practice, most of them are focused on the first effect. The second and third soft focus effects are too strong. When shooting, you must constantly adjust the exposure compensation value to control the overall soft focus effect and balance it with the on-site environment. Since you can only use F2.8 depth of field for shooting and focusing under soft focus is also quite difficult, you can only do your best to adjust the range that you want to soften, and you will need to make more adjustments in post-processing. This lens is rarely used, whether in the film or digital age because it is really difficult to master. In the era before digital mirrorless cameras, adjusting the EV and exposure effects directly through the EVF/LCD was much more convenient.

The key to playing with old lenses is to showcase their unique characteristics. Each old lens has its personality and may require specific environments, lighting, and distances to perform at its best. The beauty of imperfection, such as chromatic aberration, vignetting, and black corners, is also the source of the vintage lens flavour, which may exist to highlight the subject. Simply looking at resolution charts has limited benefits for real-world shooting because shooting at F2.8 aperture, combined with soft focus effects, means that resolution is not the only important factor.

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Using a telephoto lens to shoot wide-angle photos can bring distant elements closer and compress the scene, resulting in a more exciting and varied effect than using a wide-angle lens. However, it may require more time to adjust the composition.

To most photography enthusiasts today, a soft-focus lens may be equivalent to a black soft filter. Using a soft-focus lens for shooting is no longer as common as before because post-processing technology has been significantly advanced. Softening can be done in post-production without the need for a unique soft-focus lens. However, using a soft-focus lens can bring a unique style and effect, and in some cases, it can more effectively highlight the subject, such as shooting weddings, portraits, flowers, etc. Of course, for some photography enthusiasts, using a soft-focus lens may be more about experiencing a different style and fun, which is also a pleasure of photography.

The author has owned this lens for more than ten years and never thought they would use it for street photography more than taking pictures of flowers and plants. Of course, even without using the soft focus effect, the image quality of this lens is still excellent, with relatively high colour saturation and contrast. The author may also bring this lens to the beach for street photography, practice for a while, and take a few more favourite photos.

The photos in the article are modified from TCP The Classic Film Presets 2021:

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