Skears Allay My Fears (and possible Tears), Cheers!

A camera is of course just a tool. At best a highly engineered precision tool, but a tool nevertheless. Merely the mechanics required to capture the whole point of photography, the photographic image. In this sense all cameras are alike within the constraints of what they're capable of delivering, because we all know that photography is principally about the photographer, everything else is just the tools required to deliver the image.

Of course the same is often said about those other old-fangled vehicles for information, vinyl records and books. All the value is in the music and wordy content, the data, not the physical means of delivery. All this information can be had at the touch of a keyboard these days, vinyl and paper have no intrinsic value and if you say otherwise your just a fetishist. It is said...

Which is of course a particular kind of proscriptive marketing bullshit, the kind of tech-cult nonsense that has lead us to the current half-baked shitshow of AI. A techy future that promises to release us from the terrible burden of physical interaction, something that we humans have enjoyed since the moment we were handed a rattle and a set of multi-coloured wooden bricks to play with. We like things. Some of us love things... some things at any rate.

So I got my broken FED 1 camera back, and boy did I miss it. So much so that I cheated repeatedly on it with another camera, eventually inviting another cheap Soviet Rangefinder into the house, just for fun you understand. Don't judge me, a month is a long time to go without something that feels so good in the hand, I think we can all agree on that.

My lovely Soviet-era camera has come back following a full service with several significant improvements, and all for just £54 which is a fair bit less than I was a-feared of, so top marks to Steve, the repair wizard at Skears Cameras, Northampton. It makes such a refreshing change to be able to heartily recommend a service like this, and the shop was beautifully air-conditioned on a very hot day when I collected the camera, so thanks for that too!

The most important repair was the jammed winding mechanism, not so much broken as (presumably) benefitting from a jolly good hoover and polish following the recent film shredding incident. I'm also assured that the shutter curtains are in good condition and all the shutter speeds should now work accurately. I was slightly concerned they were a smidge slow which is very common with cameras that have probably not been cleaned and lubricated for decades. Also what turned out to be a the slightly rusty pressure plate has been given a good polish, so that should hopefully eliminate the fine scratch lines I was getting across negatives.

I understand that it's standard practice to re-calibrate the Rangefinder optics when a camera is re-assembled, and this seems to have improved the accuracy. The Rangefinder on this camera should line-up on a very distant subject when the lens is in its locked 'infinity' position, but I found this was always slightly off. It now appears to be bang-on.

A big plus for me is the improvement in the Aperture adjustment which whilst useable was quite stiff to operate, a particular problem as it's pretty-much a thumbnail operation and I have a longstanding habit of biting my nails! Knowing how much work is involved in servicing these lenses I asked whether anything that could be done, but not to worry if it involved a full strip down. I'm delighted to say the lens has come back much improved.

One final piece of outstanding service from the Skears team was removing the 1/4 inch thread adapter from the Tripod Mount, restoring it back to its original 3/8 inch, a much easier job with the correct tool it seems.

1/4 inch is the standard for all but the biggest cameras now so it's no surprise the camera came with the adapter, but my best vintage Tripod is also a bit old-skool with the older thread size. It would also give me the opportunity to try this similarly vintage FED table clamp 'Tripod' doohickey that's been hanging around for some time now.

Cast in Aluminium to typically vague Soviet tolerances, if there's one accessory for these cameras you simply must have, I wouldn't in all honesty make it this one. Whilst it seems to work after a fashion, the weight of the camera on the base plate makes it feel like it's likely to bend it, not that the screw goes in particularly straight which probably doesn't help. I wouldn't want to clamp the rough alloy onto anything too precious neither, and as for the rather nasty looking attachment designed to actually screw into something!... 

On the plus side, it is pocketable, so I may fit some Felt padding on the wonky plate and give it a go now that I've loaded the camera up with some Ilford HP5 Plus 400, c/o my friend up the road who's gone back (forward?) to digital for the time being.

There’s A New Camera In Town!

Why do they do it? Why, when they know we're almost certain to take the bait do they lay these irresistible traps for us? And why are they always in the most likely of places!

I can only assume they knew I was coming. At my lowest ebb, missing the old FED-1 which is still away for repair, and with nothing quirkily Soviet in the house to play with. They must have known! In fact it's entirely possible that ‘they’ actually broke the FED in the first place, knowing fine well I'd be unable to resist a replacement of similar (or indeed much lesser) value.

'They' in this case was a dealer of rare and expensive books and other ephemera, hidden away in an Antiques Centre that I've never been to before. So in all honesty they probably didn't know I was coming. Antique centres have become something of a hot-spot for Vintage Camera spotting, albeit that they're often in poor condition, casually propped on a shelf alongside the expensive Wedgewood Furniture and Chippendale Porcelain that dealers have a much better understanding of. I think this may have been the case here given that there was a similar, slightly older version of this camera on another stall, rather tatty, almost certainly broken, and at well over twice the price. This one stung me just £12, which seemed little enough. I couldn't resist a closer look, with no obligation to buy of course...

The Zorki 4K is the slightly later version of the Soviet made Zorki 4 camera, this one built in the mid-70’s which seems so much younger than the FED, and yet it's still half way to being an antique! So this is one of the many Barnack style Leica-ish clones of the time, a fully manual Rangefinder with a well regarded Jupiter 8 50mm Lens. At the outset I'd have to say I don't like the look of this camera quite as much as the FED, and I was certainly not in the market for a less attractive version of a camera I already have. I’m not sure whether this Zorki is actually bigger than the FED, but it just looks bigger to me. The top plate is certainly a few centimetres taller, mainly to accommodate a bigger viewfinder than the FED, which is of course a good thing. It's just not as neat up-top as the earlier Barnack’s, certainly not pocketable with the non-collapsible lens, and when snuggled in its attractive black leather case... well, it looks bloody enormous to be honest.

So not necessarily my dream vintage camera, but what’s good about it. Quite a lot actually, enough to force my hand on the £12 price. I didn’t even haggle over it!

• 
  A top Film Speed of 1000 and f2 Aperture makes this a fair bit faster than the FED, which I now regard as a ‘Sunny Summer Weight’ camera.

• The Viewfinder is not only bigger, but has a nice smooth 'glasses-friendly' eyepiece.

• What’s more, it comes with a Dioptre adjustment so in theory I can now shoot sans-spectacles, although given my terribly strong prescription, only just!

• The whole back of the camera comes off which makes film loading and troubleshooting infinitely easier than the FED.

• It has a Film Advance/Cocking Lever, not the stiff knurled knob of earlier Barnacks.

There are of course other differences, such as the Timer Mechanism and Flash Sync that my FED lacks, but these are facilities I'm not likely to use. There are also one or two inevitable problems (more of which later)...

Camera Love Is All Around Us

Working, or indeed playing with vintage cameras can be fun. Sometimes difficult, occasionally frustrating, but fun nevertheless. It certainly needs to be, it's an expensive business putting a film through a camera, and with no guarantee of good results.

Of course if it's inexpensive photography you're after, digital is without peer, even phone cameras deliver great results if you can cope with the background software messing with your image. If it has to be film though, a big chunky SLR with high quality interchangeable lenses will give a more consistent result, and this is where most people seem to be picking their film photography back up again. For myself, I don't recall ever really desiring a high-spec SLR, digital or analogue, and here's why...

It's that fun thing again. Fun and convenience. Because I do a fair bit of walking, and fun for me means having a camera to hand at all times when out and about. Throughout much of my youth that meant whatever fixed or autofocus point and shoot I was planning to lose at a gig or party that week. When I finally got round to replacing my precious but infrequently used Praktica SLR with a decent digital camera, I went straight for the Micro Four Thirds format. Almost all the flexibility of a DSLR but without the off-putting bulk. Size you see, whilst not everything, is pretty crucial to me, and I know that if I'd gone for a big chunky DSLR or zoom equipped autofocus, I simply wouldn't have taken it out and used it as much.

So when I started looking for a vintage film camera to reignite my interest in photography, early Leica Rangefinders and their many Barnack style clones particularly appealed to me. Whilst the FED-1 (above, squeezed into a slightly too small Leica case) is a heavy chunk of a camera, its great design strength is its compact size, particularly with the standard collapsible lens which means it fits snugly into a jacket pocket.

The Baldessa is also quite a small camera, another Rangefinder so lacking the unsightly (to me!) bulge on the top plate that most SLR's are saddled with. But because of the (very good) fixed lens it's never going to be the slim pocketable camera that the FED is. Nevertheless, it slips with ease into a shoulder bag alongside the essential travel items of reading glasses, paperback book, and beer tokens, so I've taken to travelling with one or the other at all times now, which is how it should be. The photos shown here were taken on the Baldessa, not on specific trips out for photography, just as and when I saw a subject that interested me such as the iconic Grosvenor House in Corby Town (above).

Old-fangled signage on an Ironstone wall in Oundle

Corby Town Centre including the famous Clock on the right

Corby Town's Olympic size Swimming Pool

The bar of the Alexandra Arms in Kettering

The former Regal Cinema in Kettering

The Eleanor Cross in Geddington

Look At The Muck In Here!

Thoughts and Prayers please! The ‘senior’ Soviet camera had a bit of a ‘funny (non) turn’ recently, so it's having the equivalent of a full cardiac check-up and artery flush. Needless to say this (potentially eye-wateringly expensive) treatment is being done on the private, but every camera deserves to shoot its best life and I have no intention of (ahem!) sending it to Switzerland just yet.

As you may know from a previous post, I managed to hamfistedly shred a film through the FED recently. A low budget horror story for sure, but thankfully no lasting damage done, or so I thought!

36 trouble-free exposures later and I was confident that all was well, but a closer examination of the scans revealed that something wasn’t quite right...

The small black ‘gromit’ that’s been appearing on negatives for some time now is still stubbornly refusing to go away, or indeed move (right). This predates the shredding incident, a speck of something within the camera that must be close to the focal point given that it’s so sharply defined. Now if the back of a FED-1 opened up like ‘normal’ cameras, I’d have already sorted this problem out, but this is a bottom-loader in the old Barnack style and you wouldn’t believe how many screws and knobs need removing just to reveal the shutter mechanism! Besides, this isn’t in fact my main concern with the camera.

Exhibit No.2 is this significantly paler area at the edge of the image (left). Something I may have put down to a line of clouds if it wasn't for the fact that it manifests on most, if not all the photos from my Loughborough Sculpture Trail. Looking back at earlier scans I can see that this is not in fact a new problem, but does seem to be more notable. This may of course be down to the brighter conditions of near-Summer highlighting the problem.

So a fundamental issue that's not likely to go away, almost certainly down to one of the Shutter Curtains needing adjusting, or as all the evidence is pointing to, the shutter mechanism needing a jolly good clean before things get any worse.

In truth I've been quite lucky that a fully manual camera from around 1953 has worked at all. These cameras were robustly built, but many will have developed one or more faults with age and potentially half a century or more of neglect. This leaves us in the tricky position of either dismantling and repairing the camera ourselves, not an impossible task but mighty fiddly, or sending it off to an expert in the field.

Expertise like this comes at a price of course, much of which is to be found in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine. Lucky for me there are one or two experts nearby, and my hand has now been forced somewhat by things getting significantly worse.

Back to that shredded film then, gentle tapping of the body over a sheet of white paper, and with the bottom plate removed, has revealed just how much 'kipple' the camera has acquired over time (above & below). Yes there's a fair few film shreds, but much of the dirt appearing on the paper appears to be pieces of hardened grease or other lubricant.

Worse still, during this gentle tapping, shooting and winding process, the wind-on knob seized mid-turn, refusing to budge even with the shutter mechanism disengaged. Clearly this camera is in need of a CLA (Clean, Lubricate, Adjust), a job best left to the professionals on this occasion.

Now there's a school of thought that because of the high costs of maintenance involved, many vintage cameras are simply not worth repairing. Just go out and buy an inexpensive new (old) one and consign the faulty unit to the display cabinet. This seems terribly wasteful to me, and perhaps more to the point, starting from scratch with a replacement merely kicks the can down the road, you're investing once again in a camera of unknown provenance and likely to fall foul of similar problems in the long run. Yes it's going to be expensive, but hopefully I'll end up with a camera as close to it's original working condition as possible.

So the FED is now in the hands of repair specialists, who to my relief appeared totally unfazed by the (almost) antique model I presented them with. Depending on the results I'll tell you who, and how much when I get the camera back. Thoughts and Prayers for my wallet then...