Testing the Retropia Vintage Glow Lens Filter
05/09/26
As someone who shoots with an ever-growing collection of vintage lenses, I found the promise of Retropia’s “Vintage Glow” lens filter to be kind of interesting. One of the biggest struggles with vintage glass is the lack of autofocus, which, to be fair, is more of a bother with video work than with photography, but still, this filter promised to turn all of my modern lenses into something a little more vintage. So, did it?
Well, I thought the best way to find out would be to do something appropriate, like a portrait session, so I hit up my friend Geneva and we headed out to my “studio” at Mount Yarrowyck. The session itself was mostly fun, at least after the nerves had calmed down, as we had a run-in with a baby brown snake on our walk out to the studio space...
The sun was warm, the wind was dry, Spring is really here in force, and from what I had seen online, those are the sort of conditions this filter was best suited to. We did have a lot of intermittent cloud cover, which did its best to flatten the lighting, but thankfully there were enough moments of light in between to really see what this filter could do.
I used the filter on both my Canon R8 with the 50mm f/1.8, as well as the Canon 90D with the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX. The actual colour of the filter is pretty attractive, I think. I tend to warm up my images a lot, especially during the warmer months, so it was nice having that feel straight out of camera.
The bloom, on the other hand, I am sort of mixed on. I knew the glow would be intense, but I don’t think I expected it to be quite as intense as it is. It definitely looks better to my eyes on the images that have sharp areas of clean contrast, as opposed to larger bright areas where the bloom is pretty all-encompassing, such as on Geneva’s dress. I feel like if the effect was maybe half as strong, I might vibe with it more, but that said, it was only my first time shooting with the filter, so maybe that’s something that will tone down with experience and just shooting in the right light. The bloom is not something I have ever noticed from any of my vintage lenses, even the Helios, so I wonder if its more of a side effect of the film development process they are trying to emulate?
All I can do for now is keep experimenting and sharing my thoughts, and thank Geneva again for risking the snakes to come and shoot with me in the bush.
