Originally posted by Andrew_Oid Thanks for the response. The delicate colors of the desert images remind me of Kyle McDougall who shoots medium and large format and posts on YT. It's a good look IMO. That you can get such results with the lens speaks to your ability in post-processing then.
Wow, thank you! That's high praise. I looked through some of his work and I really like what he does. His framing and colors work really well with the desert landscape. I've passed through many of the same towns he's visited. I see he's been to Amboy, too.
I got to drive up north again this past weekend, and I took an Industar-61 52mm f/2.8 this time. Mine is the Leica-mount version, made at the FED factory in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Most Soviet factory names were pragmatic descriptions of their location and purpose, like Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works (KMZ) or Leningrad Optical Mechanical Institute (LOMO). FED is unusual in that it bears the name of a person instead: Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, Polish noble turned revolutionary, architect of the Red Terror, and founder of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police and predecessor of the KGB.
My copy was made in 1985. Just like the Industar-50, there was also an M42 version which was optically identical, so you can use basically this same lens on Pentax. I bought my copy for $21 seven years ago, and it's still a dirt-cheap lens today. Unfortunately, the M42 version is less common and 2-3x more expensive than the FED Leica-thread-mount (LTM) version.
I admit I really didn't like the lens at first. I've read high praise about its sharpness, and it is indeed sharp, but I didn't like anything else about it: the rendering and colors in particular. I just didn't get along with it. I haven't used it much since I bought it years ago, and I took it with me on a whim. Now, I'm really glad I did. Back then, I was hung up on one style of shallow-DOF, hyper-saturated photography that the lens isn't well suited for. I've tried to be more flexible lately, and it turns out, it's the perfect road trip lens. We get along just fine now.
As with all Industar lenses, it's a Tessar 4/3 formula, a Zeiss design dating back to 1902, which is a modified triplet with the last element replaced with a cemented doublet. Thanks to the simple formula, contrast is very good for a Soviet lens. As I mentioned before, it's very sharp, but the out-of-focus rendering is bland at best, jittery and distracting at worst. It's not the best portrait lens.
The consistency across the frame is some of the best I've seen in a rangefinder lens. Even the corners are pretty good.
I think I'll be using this lens a lot more in the future.