Soligor 35mm f/3.5 – A Cheap and Cheerful Softie

I bought this from Real Camera because I wanted a wider-than-50mm lens for my Praktica SLR, not having any idea who Soligor are/were (and still not much the wiser). It was cheap at £27 so I didn’t expect much. The camera was also cheap-as-chips so it’s a good match.

The idea of a 35mm lens with F3.5 with a minimum focusing distance of 1 metre hardly gets ones pulse racing, but I was content to be unexcited. I put it on my Praktica and went out snapping with more curiosity than expectation.

It’s got a Pre-set aperture rather than the M42 pin, so you set it for exposure, open up to focus with a bright(ish) image, and if you remember, close it down to the preset before taking the picture.

This is not the sharpest tool in the box. The lens seems to be sharpish at f/16 and much less so at wider apertures. The pictures have a pleasantly soft and dreamy feel, which suits some subjects well. I enjoy a change from my sharper lenses now and then. I had some ProImage 100 in that I’d almost finished with the Pentacon 50mm, so I switched to the Soligor and went to the Dovestone Reservoir at the far Northwestern part of the Peak District.

Here is the entrance to the spillway shaft the overflows when the water levels are high.

I ran out of colour so I put some XP2 in, and walked up the clough to Ashway Moss. There is a rock formation called the “Trinnacle” as it’s three outcrops together. Here it is with some mixed lighting. I had to push & pull the scanned image to get it looking pleasantly balanced.

There is a cross on Ashway Moss. It commemorates a man who was accidently shot in a grouse hunt.

A few months later and it had snowed. I love snow and I always like to take pictures of it. I had been looking forward to photographing the discarded millstones below Stanage Edge in the snow and this was the perfect opportunity.

The scans were from Analogue Wonderland and I was impressed with how clean (free of dust) they were, but the snow looked very grey, so I had to do some jiggery pokery in Shotwell (my favourite image editor for Linux) to get them looking a little brighter without overdoing it, because it was a very grey misty day.

The last two were taken on the same day, just some foliage and trees in the heavy mist.

I’m really happy with the way the images I got through the Soligor 35mm 3.5 lens turned out. It was an unknown quantity, a cheap experiment, and in this case it turned out favourably. The softness and low contrast reminds me a bit of some plastic toy cameras, although not in the same class of “adorably crap”, but cheaper to run with 35mm film.

I don’t use Instathingy or other social media sites, but I do put things on Flickr sometimes, if you’d like to see more of my pictures, here.

thanks for reading !

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