Soviet made

or some lomography

On May 4^th I posted a note about the “new kid in town” - a Lubitel 166 camera that got into my possession. It is 1980’s made, special edition for the Moscow Olympic games. No point in telling you about my happiness – my first twin lens reflex (TLR) camera! I managed to push that point of telling you about my happiness until today when it is the subject of this post. And yes, I am happy, happy with the camera, happy with the results.

I had in the fridge a roll of HP5 expired since November 2018. Loaded the film thinking: “Well, if it is to go wrong, at least the film was expired” and I was ready to go out and take some photos. I know, on black and white film, the famous effect of Lomo cameras is not that visible but for me it did not matter. At a latter stage I will load the camera with a colour film and will show you the results but until then let’s see what I got from the first roll.

My first impressions are:

- great focus, easy to achieve;

- great metering, very forgiving in all of light situations (I’ve took light readings using the app on my phone and dial them in the camera);

- easy to hand held at slow shutter speeds as there’s no mirror so no shaking;

- manually winding the film was a problem at the start but I realised the mistake I’ve made and there was no problem after that;

- advice: don’t wind the film until you are ready to shoot, otherwise it’s very easy to release the shutter and the frame is gone.

Of course, I did a few mistakes and I ended up with multiexposures but I’m happy even with the results of them.

At the moment camera is loaded with another HP5 roll so stay tuned, I will post more photos.

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Note: except a bit of cropping in some cases, none of the photos are edited in any way, they are exactly as they came out from the scanner.