My hope is in the daily appreciation of what I had
appreciated before. New feelings or feelings of new discoveries have never
taken the lead in my celebrating the joy of being in company with the quotidian.
So I bought a broken 1970s Soviet Salyut S medium
format camera for sentimental reasons. I have used one before and wanted to
hear that all-bronze curtain slam again with each tripping of the shutter.
A bronze curtain made behind the Iron Curtain…
Actually, these cameras are not difficult to fix if
the problem is “frozen gear” rather than “broken gear”. All it takes is
patience, lighter fluid, cotton swabs, and luck. I have brought many a
mechanical camera to life again with a good clean of the hardened, glue-like lubricants
that have self-petrified after decades of non-use.
The Salyut has a special history as it is said that
all the pieces (steel, leather and bronze) were hand fitted and adjusted in the
1970s. It is also a remote relative of the Swedish-made Hasselblad a classic
professional camera that often costs more than the car I drive. But most
interestingly, the Salyut had 3 original lenses only – a 90mm, a 150mm and a
super wide 30mm that looked like a military weapon and weighed about 2 kg… In
addition of being crude in their functioning, these lenses had the most amazing
background blurring ability I have seen in the hundreds of lenses I owned and
used. The background (called bokeh) is
often harsh, contrasty and like a Rorschach ink blot page…
So, I worked on the camera for a week or so and felt
like it was working predictably to test it with a roll of 120mm B&W film.
The most “expected” problem with these cameras is the spacing of the frames on
the negatives – they usually either overlap (bad film holders) or are
erratically spaced. That of course can be discovered only after developing the
roll of film.
I finished the twelve 6x6 frame shots one can take on a
120mm film with this camera and rushed to develop the roll. After more than 50
years, I still get excited with the unknown associated with looking at a wet
strip of freshly developed film holding it to a red light.
I was pleased – the spacing between the frames was
very consistent, and the speed/diaphragm combination seemed to have yielded bright
frames with the f2.8 90mm Vega lens. The photo shown at the outset was taken at 1/125 sec and f8, still showing strange background shapes even when stepped down.
I am eager to try it with the 150mm Kaleinar and
30mm Arsat lenses soon.
August 9, 2019
©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019
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