light

as i mentioned earlier, my good friend bought with him a couple of boxes filled with old cameras, gizmos, flashes, lenses, filmcameras and gadgets with no name, from his folks’ house back home. his father had bought all of it at a market or a second-hand shop somewhere in sweden.

among the very well kept cameras were kodak brownies, a beautyflex, a zenit 12xp and a praktica pentor super tl.

i got the honor of doing test runs on the praktica and the zenit. the praktica had a small problem with the winding mechanism, but nothing that a wiggle and some good karma wouldn’t fix. the zenit went right into shoot mode and had absolutely no objections - well, apart from the focus ring being a bit on the “sticky” side… at least it makes for very precise focusing! the viewfinders are, let’s see, not exactly crystal clear, but what else could one expect from cameras this old? i guess there’s some corrosion in the glass itself. anyhow, i have no problems seeing what i need to see through them.

i’ve loaded the cameras with some fuji slide film because they both have relatively fast lenses (pentacon auto f1.8 / 50mm on the pentor and a helios f2 / 58mm on the zenit) and these guys are fully manual, so i guess getting flawless exposures should be quite easy (knock on wood!). i’m halfway through both rolls now so i guess you can expect some results here soon.

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