Testing, Testing, 1-24 (Uppingham Fatstock 2025)

When I first came across this camera in a local antiques centre (because that's how you buy cameras now), I spent a few minutes cocking and releasing, knob twiddling, squinting and goggling, indeed all the stuff you should definitely do before buying a 70 year old mechanical device. Everything seemed to be ok, but of course the only way to know for sure is to buy a roll of film, pick your jaw up off the floor when you see the price, shoot it all off as fast as possible on something trivial, get it developed, pick your jaw back up off the floor again, and wait for the scans...

Probably my first photo with the FED, bit blurred, rushed I think, slow down Mark!

My trivial subject was the annual Fatstock Show in the ridiculously attractive Rutland town of Uppingham. All honey coloured stone, tweed jackets, and cow shit. An excellent subject for a first attempt at getting reasonable images from the camera, or so I thought...

A camera with relatively low shutter speeds and a slow-ish lens like this one is unlikely to excel at shooting from hand in low light conditions, so it helped that the day broke as bright and sunny as you could wish for in late November. Possibly too bright as it happens, film doesn't seem to handle the contrast between brightly lit backgrounds and shadowy foregrounds, who knew!

Perhaps the first lesson I've learnt about this camera is... don't attempt to learn how to use it during one of Uppingham's most popular events of the year. Every farmer and rural tourist for acres around had crammed into the town's bijou market square to view the prize-winning beasts with much jostling for position on the fence line. A camera like this needs careful thought and patience, not the the scrum of a busy livestock show, hence many shots were wasted, and those that did get through would have benefitted from the undoubted convenience of a mobile phone camera.

I'm happy enough with some of these shots (above), if nothing else they show that the camera/lens combo is capable of taking good photos in the right hands, but there's clearly an awful lot more learning to do here.

Framing for example, always a problem on a camera like this, particularly if you wear glasses as I do. The viewing apertures for both the Viewer and Rangefinder are pretty small, and in the case of these Soviet cameras, surrounded by attractive cast alloy ferrules that will absolutely destroy the lenses in your glasses if you get close enough to actually see through them. In my enthusiasm to shoot a roll I inevitably scratched my glasses, and whilst I now have an adequate work-round for this problem (right) it's certainly not pretty. I feel there must be a more elegant solution…

The view from The Vaults pub, showing the issue of shaded areas in strong sunlight

Was it fun though! Well...

It could have been funner if I'm honest. The crowds and my inexperience with the camera made for a more fraught experience than it should have been, this is not a camera for the racetrack, or indeed agricultural show ring. I can see I’m likely to get a lot more out of it in the landscape, art and architectural photography, still life’s, maybe even sparsely populated gigs, nothing too lively. Or maybe I'll get better at setting the camera up and standing in the right place at the right time, all the better to catch the fast-paced, adrenaline fuelled excitement of... err, Cows and Sheep.

(Film was Kodak Colour Plus 200, developing by Max Spielmann, both for ease and speed really)

Cameras & Me - An Introduction

There comes a time, or so it seems, in every wannabe photographers life, when moving things forward almost inevitably involves moving backwards. Back to a time when things were easier and therefore more fun, or so it seems.

I'm no technophobe, but I do find every upgrade to a new mobile device brings fewer knobs and dials to play with, and ever more menus to navigate and (to me) hidden features that need discovering. It's not so much difficult as just... well, tedious really. Learning time is surely better spent when there's an element of fun too, and I've never found tech that much fun to be honest.

THE CAMERAS

I've been through an awful lot of point-and-shoot's in my time, some of which were pretty high quality Autofocus cameras with good lenses and cool styling (a Yashica T4 for example), some were truly abysmal cheapies that I regret wasting film on to this day. My lifestyle meant that a camera was predominantly for recording gigs, parties, drunken holidays etc. the hedonism of youth in all it's out-of-focus and grainy glory, hence many cameras were broken, or indeed lost (a Yashica T4 for example). I went ever cheaper in the sure knowledge that expense was wasted on cameras and me. I never went down the disposable camera route though, I never sank that low...

Image c/o Frode Inge Helland (used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Ported license)

My first 'proper' camera was a Praktica B100 (above), an automatic SLR that my Dad encouraged me to buy so that with the aid of a Tamron adapter I could use some of his fancy Olympus lenses. I loved everything about this camera, it looked and felt like a proper grown-up camera should, got me into the habit of shooting Aperture Priority, and gave me a good grounding in the mysteries of Depth of Field and Manual Focussing. I had this camera for a good few years before dropping it and cracking the body, at which point I upgraded to a Praktica BC1, which for some reason I didn't love quite as much.

Fast forward to Digital, of which I was a fairly early adopter, although it took a good few years before I moved on from autofocus compacts and invested in one of those cool Olympus PEN (right) cameras advertised by Kevin Spacey. This has been without a doubt my hardest working camera, at the very heart of almost all the content on my previous blogs. I love the slightly retro look and compact format which is almost pocketable. The lens is a bit chonkier than the super-cool pancake job Spacey was packing in those adverts, and of course compact means dispensing with a proper viewfinder, but I've found this such a useable camera in every way. Whilst it's still in the house this camera is no longer mine, and I still miss it. In fact I may pinch it back one day...

It was around this time I started with the whole 'looking back to go forward' thing. I wanted those dials and knobs back, and a few more megapixels and a viewfinder of sorts wouldn't hurt, hence an upgraded Olympus PEN (above), a camera which if truth be told I hardly use these days. Not through any fault of the camera I hasten to add, more that it coincided with a serious cooling of interest in the blog that had been a minor obsession for the best part of ten years. Put simply, I had all the gear, but really no idea what to use it for, and every time I thought of taking the Olympus out for a spin I'd find the battery needed charging.

Meanwhile, cameras on phones had got very good at what they do. I should know, I use mine an awful lot theses days. All the talk was that discreet camera formats had very much had their day, which for a great many of us is probably true. But until they put a few more knobs and dials on phones...

Anyone with an interest in photography (or indeed recorded music) will have noticed the growing interest in analogue formats. I guess when things become so easy, so immediate, there will always be a desire to slow things down, take more care, reconnect with what we loved about photography in the first place. For me it's about feeling that buzz I felt when I first started learning to capture images on a 1980's East German camera, accepting the limitations of what was then a beginners SLR and making it work as best I could. And let's not forget that some vintage cameras are just so good looking, so desirable!

Take this little Bencini Comet II that I bought for the wife, a beautiful late-40's design from Italy that probably still works but takes a film format which is hard to come by now, very expensive, and a bit fiddly to use successfully, so this camera will remain a decorative piece for now, but the flame was lit.

Start looking at vintage cameras and I promise you, you'll soon want a vintage camera. In amongst the many hundreds of clunky, impractical, ugly, obsolete and of course broken examples available, there will be one for you, a camera you may even fall in love with. If you're lucky it may even work. I fell in love with a Soviet era copy of the classic Leica II 35mm camera, and for all of the reasons above. Loads of knobs and dials as befits a fully manual camera, a readily available if now quite expensive film format, unusually pocket-size for such a good camera, looks absolutely beautiful, and is really quite difficult to use! It works too...

So this camera is, as far as I can tell, a FED-1(f) Rangefinder from around 1953, serial No.347457. There's a lot of information out there about these cameras which I don't intend to repeat here, and needless to say a lot of opinion too. It's not a Leica obviously, despite what the leather case might suggest. In truth I don't think I'd want to be re-learning 35mm film photography on a Leica, they're pretty expensive to buy, and equally expensive to restore/repair when broken by an idiot like me, so to have a relatively inexpensive copy that seems to be working reasonably well ticks all the boxes that I require for now.

Anyway, this blog is not really about the camera, more the journey I'll be taking towards rediscovering my enthusiasm for photography.