I hope that the abundance of internet blogs and forums for enthusiasms of so many kinds is not lost to history. They will make fascinating raw material for future students of our age of distraction. For example, on the camera kit enthusiasts’ sites you get to witness first-hand the agonies that people undergo when they try to decide which bit of equipment to buy next. Fellow enthusiasts pitch in with minute distinctions - often just as the enquirer had made their mind up, sending them back into paroxysms of indecision.
I suppose it takes a certain perversity to photograph three coloured stripes on a wall in black and white - but there was a reason. I was testing a new camera. Read on.
One such trauma which I witnessed recently was where the guy wanted to buy a Russian camera, but couldn’t decide which one. First it was going to be a Fed, then a Kiev, until he found out that the Kiev viewfinder scratches your glasses. Then it was back to Fed until someone suggested Zorki. And so on. I deeply appreciated the agonies of this guy. Because it was me.
Some conviction – springing doubtless from a deep internal inadequacy - had arisen in me that I must try a rangefinder camera. The rangefinder is a now outmoded but once very popular camera design whose great exemplar is the Leica. You can easily pay £2000 for a Leica and lens these days such is their reputation – but I certainly wasn’t going to. The Japanese equivalents are getting into four figures too. On investigation (yep, those blogs again) I found that there are Russian rangefinders for very much less. That sounded right up my street.
As keen readers of this blog will know I have form with Russian kit – namely motorcycles. And the curious thing is that much the same is said about Russian cameras as Russian motorcycles: unreliable, poorly constructed, abysmal quality control and so on. If you wanted something decent, well-built, reliable and predictable, you had to buy Japanese or German. It was only if you wanted something more left-field, requiring what was euphemistically known as “user input”, that you might think Russian.
The parallels are interesting. Just as the Ural 750 is a copy of BMW machines so Russian cameras are copies of the Leica and the Contax. And another similarity which I have noticed is that enthusiasts of Zeniths, Zorkis, Kievs and so on share one particular and loveable characteristic with their motorcycling brethren. I can only describe this as being, well, a very slight nuttiness. For example, I knew a Russophile motorcyclist who, when he got fed up of customising his bikes, customised his lawnmower. It was wonderful thing with a two-foot chrome exhaust and metallic paint job which he kept on a display plinth in his back garden. I knew another guy who had ten Dneprs and none of them actually went. He used to come to rallies in a car.
As for quality, my personal experience with them was that, so long as you kept on top of servicing and so on, they went well. So I decided to take a dive into the wonderful world of FSU cameras (Former Soviet Union, if you hadn’t guessed) and I bought this model for 67 quid.
You can get the name in beautiful Cyrillic lettering - but those were destined for the home rather than export market and are said to be of lower quality. The reverse was said to be true of the motorcycles: the worst ones went to the west. I wonder if any of these legends are actually true?
It’s a solid and rather beautiful 1970s Zorki 4K which seems to work very well – or it does now that the dealer who sold it to me has fixed the shutter speeds properly. I’ve had it several months and there are some sample shots below. The Jupiter 8 50mm lens it came with is a cracker, soft and with lots of depth, so that the subject seems to step out of the background slightly. Like this cow parsley.
I have an obsession with the form of cow parsley in winter. I find it haunting.
The light was fading and focusing wasn’t easy but beyond that the lens has offered up a lovely softness.
A rather ghostly disused government building reflected in a puddle on a very grey day.
As I familiarise myself with the world of the Russian camera, I find that the generic nuttiness is alive and well. Here you will find, for example, a guy with the most mesmeric voice on the internet to take you slowly through the details of virtually any Soviet model. He seems popular and well-informed though, and a true fan. And at the wonderful Kosmo Foto you can find out more than you may ever have wanted to know about dusty corners of the Soviet Union’s camera world. It also has fascinating pieces of social history like this article about life as a newspaper photographer in the former Soviet Union; or the upcoming auction of a camera designed for the Soviet space program (estimate of £40-50,000 if you’re interested….)
And what portfolio is complete without a good skip shot? Street photography at its gnarliest, eh?
I don’t honestly know why I bought the Zorki or whether I will keep it. The proof of the pudding etc. A camera’s a camera when all is said and done. But back on the forums, the footsoldiers of Ebay and Amazon continue their endless conversation, tormented by detail, minds blown this way and that by the winds of passing opinion and now at least I can say that I have shared their pain.
All photos shot with the Zorki and Jupiter 8 on Delta 400 film.