KMZ Tair-11A 135mm f/2.8

String lights over a garden table at dusk, a subject a couple of metres out, and a Zenit with a long Tair-11A hanging off the front. Focus wide open at f/2.8, turn the preset ring down a stop or two, and the bulbs behind her still come out as circles. Twenty diaphragm blades will do that. Hardly anything else you can screw onto an M42 body has as many, so out-of-focus highlights stay round long after other short teles have turned them into polygons.

D. S. Volosov calculated the design at GOI, and it is a simple one: four elements in three groups. It belonged to the lens set that took the Grand Prix at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, and the Tair-11 family went into serial production in 1960. The barrel says 135, though the real focal length is 133mm. What the A suffix adds is practical. An interchangeable adapter at the rear lets the same optic fit M42 or M39 Zenit bodies, and close focus comes in to 1.2 m, where the original Tair-11 stopped at 1.5 m. That 30 cm is the difference between a tight head shot and a frame filled by a face.

Owners tend to describe the same character. Most copies show some glow around bright edges wide open, and hard backlight can bring out a little colour fringing; a stop down, things usually firm up. Out-of-focus areas are smooth, free of the nervous doubled edges some cheap teles produce, and the blade count keeps the discs clean as you close down. Flare is the older-lens kind, so a deep hood earns its place whenever the sun is near the frame. Soviet quality control was uneven, and copies vary, so test one before you trust it with a job.

Now the catch. The preset diaphragm has no automatic stop-down at all; the lens closes to taking aperture only when you turn the ring yourself. You compose at f/2.8, twist down before you fire, and any TTL meter in the body reads at whatever aperture the lens is actually set to, with the finder getting darker as you go. Put that next to the SMC Takumar 135mm f/2.5 on a Spotmatic F, with its auto aperture and open-aperture metering, and the Tair feels like slow work. Against its compatriot the Jupiter-11A, it gives you a full stop more light and, to most eyes, a calmer background, in exchange for a bigger, heavier barrel.

Working the preset system well is mostly a matter of order. Take the reading in Zone Light Meter, set that aperture on the preset ring, focus wide open, then flick the ring to its stop and shoot. If you want f/2.8 outdoors in full sun on a Zenit whose shutter tops out at 1/500, a three-stop ND on the 55mm thread gets you close at ISO 100, near enough that print film will shrug off the remaining third of a stop.

These days it is a popular used buy, mostly with film portrait shooters and with mirrorless owners who adapt it purely for the out-of-focus rendering. Nobody picks it for speed of handling. They pick it because, on a manual preset lens from Krasnogorsk, those twenty blades still draw a background that few 135s of any origin can match.