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)