Tales on Film

Like I already told you, I really love the Russian cameras, especially the FED series. When I saw the first pictures that came out of the Fed Zarya, I was completely in love with them! So when I found out there exists a whole collection of the Fed cameras, I looked to complete my collection. So I bought this Fed 5. This Fed 5 is really heavy and is considered as an ugly camera. But I don’t think that is true.

The Fed 5 (often written in cyrillic) is a 35mm rangefinder camera and was produced for quite a long time in Ukrain, from 1977 until 1990. There were different types produced of this camera like the Fed 5B and Fed 5C. This camera is quite heavy, it weighs 740 grams and it has a selenium light meter. Mine came with the Industar 61 lens, which is the original 55mm 2.8 lens and I really love it! Even in darker circumstances you can still take lovely pictures. The shutter speed of this camera goes from 1 until 500, it also has a Bulb function a PC sync (up to 1/30). The Fed 5 has a self-timer.

Although some people say it’s the ugliest camera ever made, I really like this camera. Yes, it weighs really a lot, but this camera is really easy to handle. When you get used to the rangefinder focussing, it’s really a fun camera. Even if you’re not so familiar with the focussing thingy, you learn it really fast. This camera is also great to do street photography with. Because you can adjust the focussing distance, so you can easily take a picture without people noticing you’re taking a picture of them.

You can find some pictures that I took with the Fed 5 in this set on Flickr.

Until now, this is my favorite picture I made with the Fed 5.

A fellow Belgian and FPP-listener Frederic Buchet has started a project on Ulule.com to save his Fed camera. Fred uses his Fed 3 camera from 1961 to photograph the streets of Mons, Belgium. During one of his trips he left his camera in the sun and the curtain got a hole burned in it. He now wants to save his camera and have it serviced by a professional repaircenter. This costs some money however, so he is asking for our help to raise the funds.

If you decided to help him, you get rewarded by not only by his eternal gratitude, but according to the amount of money you pledge to give if the project gets a 100% funding in the next 27 days, you can get a numbered print or even a personal lesson in analog photography. Fred will be taking street photos during a 2 week period as a completion of his project. By looking through his timeline on flickr I’m pretty sure that those photos are going to be awesome, so head over to http://www.ulule.com/fred-et-fed/ and support Frederik, Sara and I already did.

While browsing for analog cameras on eBay I found this Fed Zarya at a very good price. When it arrived it triggered my love for russian cameras, since then I’m collecting Fed cameras. The Zarya is a simplified Fed 2b camera and the Fed 2b is a copy of the leica II. As with all russian cameras it was released after World War II and based on german technology. The Zaryas were produced in Kharkov, Ukraine from 1959 till 1961, it was intended for the Soviet domestic markets and was just a copy of the Fed 2b without a self-timer and coupled rangefinder. It has shutterspeeds ranging from 1/30 to 1/500 sec, it also came with an industar 26m instead of a jupiter 8 lens.

It’s a fun fully manual camera, it’s kind of annoying to use the focus, because you have to guess the distance to your subject, but that works out most of the time. The most annoying part about the camera is as with most Feds the way you load the film. But once you get the hang it, it’s not that big of a deal anymore, for a little help you can check out Filip’s post over here. Off course as with almost all early Russian cameras you have to advance the film before setting the shutter speed, otherwise you could have gap between the curtains when advancing, which would ruin your film.

The first time I had to load a Fed camera, it became clear, that it’s not the easiest thing to do, so I thought I create a small tutorial on how to load these kind of cameras.

Loading film

First, you need to turn the switches on the bottom plate, left and then turn 180 degrees, this allows you to slide the back off the camera.

The easiest way to load a film, is to take out the take-up spool of the camera, and attach the leader to it.

Then put the canister in the camera, pull out the film with the take-up spool and place the take-up spool in the camera also. Make sure you turn the take-up spool a couple of times before putting it in the camera. Most Feds and Zorkis turn anti clockwise, so keep this in mind when rolling the film, otherwise your film will detach and roll around the transport mechanism. It’s no fun to try and take some film out of that mechanism, I had to do it once and had to ruin the whole film.

To make sure you put the film in correctly and to put some tension on the film before closing the camera, wind the camera a half turn. Make sure to put some pressure on the film, so that it attaches correctly to the small teeth of the transport mechanism.

Now close the back, by sliding it on again and turn the switches on the bottom the other way, check if the back is properly closed, take 2 testshots and you should be fine for shooting.

Rewinding film

When you want to rewind the film, make sure you fired the shutter, then either turn or push the knob around the shutter button as far as you can. This will release the lock on the transport mechanism and allow you to rewind the film. If you don’t do this, you feel a lot of tension when you want to rewind the film and if you keep on trying you can rip your film. I have unloaded my first 2 rolls in a changing bag, because I didn’t know this and couldn’t figure out how to rewind the film without detaching the take-up spool.