Film Fridays: Dreams come true - discovering a stash of untouched Soviet-era cameras

It was my 1st camera!😄 it cost 15 roubles back then!

The instructions shown in the article are in Polish.

A dream come true would be finding a warehouse full of new Leica cameras. Not necessarily these,

An enticing story. In a similar but not similar vein I have started to discover Russian TV series and Movies on youtube. They are a revelation and show how good they are with film technology. and production The first series I cane across was "the Attackers".Brilliant acting and stories of a Russian group of fighter pilots in combat with Germans in ww2. The second series was just as gripping.Of interest to me was an episode where some German officials come to an outpost to do a photoshoot and press story. The photographers appear to be using cameras that look like my vintage folding Retina. My Dad used one of these in WW2. The series is on Star Media and they have English subtitles.

When I was a teenager in the 1970's, we just didn't have the budget for most SLRs. All I had was my grandmother's Kodak Instamatic. So, we scraped together the money for a Soviet SLR, the Xenit B. 1/500 top shutter speed. No meter. 50mm f/2.0 lens without modern coatings. But it did the job. I gradually added a meter, a flash unit, and eventually a Pentax lens.

When I turned 16, and was able to get a job, I replaced it with the far-superior Nikon FE. But, my uncle kept the Xenit for several years and made good use of it.

Anyway, my point is that there's a use for every camera, from the Instamatic to the D6.

I have kiev cameras and found them very joyful to handle. When cooking it, it sounds like operating an ak47, loud and grinding gears. German/Japan machines are too smooth and quiet,

Heh. "Smena 8" was my first camera.
Not far from "camera obscura" but still.
Secon one was Zenit TTL.

BIG step forward.

I grew up in Eastern Europe. This was my first camera (previous iteration Smena 8) when I started a photo class at 11y old. It was an old family camera that was sitting around for years. There was still half used undeveloped film inside. I finished the remaining exposures and developed it. To my surprize the earlier photos on the film were of me and my younger brother when I was 5y old. My aunt was the one taking photos and after she married and moved out nobody touched the camera. It was a surreal experience realizing what was on the film.

My second camera was Zenit EM couple of years later. I still have it now living in the US. My daughter used it in photo class last year and took some nice photos with it. Still working fine after 40 years, even the manual light meter is still accurate with no battery needed.

The old Smena 8 is probably still somewhere in the house where I grew up.

The 40mm/4 lens is nice and you can make suprisingly good exposures just by guesstimating both exp and distance. Double exposure feature is a nice "by-product bonus" of simple mechanism.

This was among the first cameras I have used, together with a 6X6 Certina. And no, I am not from the former USSR. :)

Oh, that’s so cool to see my article for Kosmofoto here! Many thanks and appreciations to dpreview team! I’m you big fan and constant reader since the beginning!

Plastic thread for cable release in shutter release button. Earlier cameras had metal one.

A Zenit EM was my first camera, from Cecil Jacobs in Leicester, I think. I'd love to be able to buy a new one now.

I often wonder if there's a market for a decent quality affordable film camera, but I guess not - otherwise the Voigtländer cameras would still be in production..

This was my first camera too!

I was working for the company that owned the importers of Zenit cameras and Tento binoculars. We used to buy them via the USSR embassy in Canberra by the crate. Yes we bid for a crate at a time not for the individual items.

A Smena SL was my first cam and I still have it. The 40mm f4 is a slow but fantastic lens...sharp and nice focal length.
The shutter is not the fastest, so take slow emulsions, but never underestimate what the small thing can do.

Always liked to look at the gaudy, gold plated, fake Leicas on eBay. (from Russia) It's really a hoot.

My memories are still fresh on my fully manual Praktica film slr and Boy, I don't regret a bit not having to use that camera anymore. It started losing some screws, the exposure indicator took quite some time and one of the lenses also got loose internally. That Practica was a GDR import relabelled for West Germany.

I guess this raving about such old cameras is most intense among those too young to have experienced them first-hand.

Similar thing with using expired film . You no longer attempt to create a wellfocused, well exposed picture but instead let yourself be surprised by the degrading effects.

Maybe that is why Instagram offers such a lot of "filter" effects I also never use. Or why some color their hair pink. Or use Instax cameras way worse than original instant Kodaks.

To make things different is paramount, not content or realism.

Take my Kiev...Please!

Why does it say "Made in USSR"?

Even my 1980s bottle of Soli, only finished in 2016, says CCCP on it--in Roman letters of course.

Weird. These cameras were terribly unreliable when they were common. But they were common because of communist pride. Many of them leaked light so badly, you were better off unrolling your film with your hands and putting a doublet 50mm in front of it for an exposure. ;-)

I guess with so many Web 1.0 sites long gone form places like geocities and tripod, we've lost the countless accounts of these terrible cameras.

I imagine those that have been sitting unexercised for that long are likely not long for this world.

It´s a woderful camera and if you`re lucky it might turn out be a fantastic camera.
Anyway, many camera manufacturers should have "steal" some ideas from that supersimple camera...

What a remarkable find. Hope they make good money selling them.

A story from 1981. During the first Everest ascent by Bulgarian climbers, they took with them several ‘Smena-8’ having prior to the climb removed with alcohol all lubricant (if any) from their moving parts. Thus, they were able to snatch gorgeous color photographs of their ascent with the ‘Smena-8’. The lubricant of the only ‘Leica’ they also had at their disposal, froze at high altitude and the camera was inoperable.

Those Lubitel cameras were pretty good and more much better featuring the same (?) glass. At once, Smena-2 post war plastic could give rather fun images in color. Dead end branch.

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> I took my camera and shoot a roll of Svema, a Soviet-era film that expired about the same year the camera had been produced.

Hmmm.
(2) bricks of Ecktachrome & several 100' rolls of Fuji duplicating film
in fridge since 2000. Wonder if they have collector value as to
producing unpredictable color results...?

Old warehouse find is only a mildly interesting story but Andriys photos in the article are the real story for me. Some cool looking work

Lovely story, thanks for sharing!