Pyat acquires another hobby
I own about eight film SLR cameras. I was buying them in order to steal the lenses for my DSLR, or resell bits. Mostly, they've been sitting around my newspaper cubicle, looking interesting.
Last Friday, the local thrift store had a Zenit 11 on display. The Zenit 11 was the last of the Zenit E series produced by the Belorusskoe Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie in Minsk, during the last decade of Soviet rule. Thousands were exported to counties outside the Soviet Bloc, and the one on display seems to be one of those. The branding is in Latin rather than Cyrillic.
By curious coincidence, this specimen seems to have been acquired by the store on the Fourth of July. It was $10, much less than they usually ask for their SLRs, so I snapped it up. It's a bit beat up, but everything is working. By Saturday, I'd shot two rolls. By Sunday, they were developed.
This is a photo of velvetpage taken on her 38th birthday. :D
And this is a photo of shavastak's dog, Shenzi.
I quite enjoyed using the Zenit 11. The first roll I shot was completely useless. Nothing showed up at all. However, I was using a roll of cheap Kodak film of uncertain vintage, one that could easily have been kicking around since the mid-1990s. The second roll was new Fujifilm Superia 800. The first eight exposures on the roll were unusable, exposed in odd ways and so on. The camera's selenium cell was unseated, and I fixed it around the eighth exposure, so I'm wondering if there was somehow some light leakage into the film. The remainder of the roll came out fine. Those are my two favorite shots, but everything else was good.
The experience of using a fully manual film SLR for the first time since high school has been interesting. My friends may be surprised to learn that I relied on cheap point and clicks from the drugstore for my photographic needs until I bought a Canon Photura in 2000, when I started working at a newspaper. The Photura was an odd duck of the camera world that really taught me nothing about photography, aside from how to frame something nicely. I bought my first proper digital point and click in 2004 and gradually worked my way up to a Sony DSLR in 2010.
I've taken tens of thousands of shots with a DSLR, often shooting in manual, and my ability to judge settings for a given scene seems to be relevant. What I need to work on is pushing the shutter only at the perfect time, and not giving in to the impulse to fire 20 or 30 shots and take the best one. I have also loaded some film into my Olympus Pen D half-frame camera, and I'll be experimenting with that as well.
Assuming the problem that ruined the first eight exposures in the Zenit 11 does not recur, I may take it as my primary camera on our cottage trip in a few weeks. The cottage has no phone, no internet, no television and is located on an island populated mainly by sheep. Going to film for that week seems like a fitting act, though I will bring the DSLR for the sake of the longer lenses and ability to reliably snap action shots and astrophotography.
Last Friday, the local thrift store had a Zenit 11 on display. The Zenit 11 was the last of the Zenit E series produced by the Belorusskoe Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie in Minsk, during the last decade of Soviet rule. Thousands were exported to counties outside the Soviet Bloc, and the one on display seems to be one of those. The branding is in Latin rather than Cyrillic.
By curious coincidence, this specimen seems to have been acquired by the store on the Fourth of July. It was $10, much less than they usually ask for their SLRs, so I snapped it up. It's a bit beat up, but everything is working. By Saturday, I'd shot two rolls. By Sunday, they were developed.
This is a photo of velvetpage taken on her 38th birthday. :D
And this is a photo of shavastak's dog, Shenzi.
I quite enjoyed using the Zenit 11. The first roll I shot was completely useless. Nothing showed up at all. However, I was using a roll of cheap Kodak film of uncertain vintage, one that could easily have been kicking around since the mid-1990s. The second roll was new Fujifilm Superia 800. The first eight exposures on the roll were unusable, exposed in odd ways and so on. The camera's selenium cell was unseated, and I fixed it around the eighth exposure, so I'm wondering if there was somehow some light leakage into the film. The remainder of the roll came out fine. Those are my two favorite shots, but everything else was good.
The experience of using a fully manual film SLR for the first time since high school has been interesting. My friends may be surprised to learn that I relied on cheap point and clicks from the drugstore for my photographic needs until I bought a Canon Photura in 2000, when I started working at a newspaper. The Photura was an odd duck of the camera world that really taught me nothing about photography, aside from how to frame something nicely. I bought my first proper digital point and click in 2004 and gradually worked my way up to a Sony DSLR in 2010.
I've taken tens of thousands of shots with a DSLR, often shooting in manual, and my ability to judge settings for a given scene seems to be relevant. What I need to work on is pushing the shutter only at the perfect time, and not giving in to the impulse to fire 20 or 30 shots and take the best one. I have also loaded some film into my Olympus Pen D half-frame camera, and I'll be experimenting with that as well.
Assuming the problem that ruined the first eight exposures in the Zenit 11 does not recur, I may take it as my primary camera on our cottage trip in a few weeks. The cottage has no phone, no internet, no television and is located on an island populated mainly by sheep. Going to film for that week seems like a fitting act, though I will bring the DSLR for the sake of the longer lenses and ability to reliably snap action shots and astrophotography.