I sat in the garden with a Flektogon mounted on my Nikon Zf. No herons, no 600mm – just the garden, some flowers, and a lens that’s seen better decades but still knows what it’s doing.
How did I get it? Short version: £35 for a whole kit on eBay. A Praktica bag, MTL 50 body, three lenses. The Flektogon 35mm f/2.4 MC alone can easily fetch £150–200, with choice copies going well above that – so the random kit turned out to be a pretty smart accident. Worth keeping your eyes open – deals like this happen less often than a heron in my garden, but they do happen.
Technical Specifications
| Spec | Value |
|---|---|
| Focal Length | 35 mm |
| Maximum Aperture | f/2.4 |
| Optical Formula | 6 elements in 6 groups |
| Coatings | MC (Multi-Coating) |
| Angle of View | 63° (diagonal) |
| Minimum Focusing Distance | 0.2 m (ring travels to ~18–19 cm) |
| Maximum Magnification | 1:2.4 |
| Filter Thread | 49 mm |
| Aperture Blades | 6 (straight) |
| Aperture Range | f/2.4–f/22 |
| Mount | M42 |
| Length | 48.5 mm |
| Weight | ~240 g |
| f/2.4 version introduced | 1976 |
| Manufacturer | Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) |
Why the Flektogon?
This isn’t your average 35mm. Its hidden superpower is the minimum focusing distance. The scale on the focus ring shows 0.2 m – but the ring turns beyond that, below the marked minimum. In practice the ring travels down to around 18–19 cm. Most modern 35mm lenses stop at 30–40 cm. That gap matters when you want to get into a flower while keeping a wide background perspective – an effect you simply can’t replicate with a longer focal length.
The MC (Multi-Coating) version handles contrast well even in tricky light. The lens is all metal, heavier than you’d expect for its size, with a silky smooth focus ring – manual focusing is a pleasure, not a fight.
Garden Test
I recorded a view through the viewfinder so you can see how the lens actually works: how smoothly focus travels, how depth of field shifts, how bokeh behaves wide open.
Flowers, grasses, small details – my garden is the perfect testing ground for a lens that can get this close. With my walker within reach and the Flektogon on the camera, I covered a few square metres and didn’t need to look far for subjects.
At the end of the post and the video you’ll find more shots taken with this lens – from the garden session and other situations where I put it through its paces.
Is it worth hunting for deals like this?
Yes, with some caution. The Flektogon is a lens with character – warm rendering, slight softness wide open, noticeable vignetting that disappears once you stop down. It’s not the sharpness of a modern GMaster and nobody expects it to be. It’s a lens with soul, producing images that are hard to replicate digitally.
Good copies go for £150–200, some even higher. A complete set with case and caps in mint condition can fetch over £500. If a whole kit shows up for £35 – you don’t ask questions, you just go.
Condition matters a lot with this lens. You’ll find copies with worn markings, scratches, damaged coatings – those go cheaper. Mine is in mint condition – similar copies on eBay sell for around $550. True collector pieces, never used, with original case and manual – up to $660. For £35 I got something worth many times that.
Stay tuned,
Your Photographer with a walker
🎥 Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/bTuXydWdJK4
