Photos from a Modified 1955 Soviet Zorki Camera Using 20 Years Old Expired AGFA Film

 

 

As I posted previously, the rainy season in Arizona gave me the opportunity to stay home and repair old cameras that were sitting on the shelf. One of these cameras is a 1955 Zorki.

I have collected and used most models of 35mm and medium format cameras from the Soviet Union days. It is well known that while most cameras were somehow “copies” or imitations of German and Swedish classics, the Soviet cameras never worked as well. In fact often they never worked. However, many of the lenses paired with these cameras did include innovative modifications of the lenses they copied and some worked beautifully.

I belong to those photographers who knowing all the limitations of these vintage cameras, still pursue the challenge of making them work, for reasons that cannot often be justified if the goal is to have reliable and able instruments. But for historical reasons and for the stubborn belief that somehow, a lens can be mounted on a camera and both modified enough to produce photos most would find irrational to spend so much time trying. After all one can just buy a digital camera or just use the one in any smart phone and get instant pictures. Why still use film, 50 or more years old mechanical cameras, and spend time in a darkroom?

For those of us who for more than 50 years have seen what film and mechanical cameras can produce, the above questions seem unanswerable when asked by those who have come to photography with the digital age.

 

So, the 1955 Zorki is one of my favorite Soviet rangefinder cameras as it is very well built, is reliable, and is a joy to hold in my palm while walking in the streets. Sure, it is not a Leica, but it has an undeniable character that is very pleasing.

… It was the 1990s when film started “fading away”. Very soon mechanical cameras lost all value and one could buy them for next to nothing. More, sellers would throw into the deal a bunch of lenses, light meters and darkroom tools. After all who needs these if no one would be using film cameras anymore?

In short, I ended up with dozens of lenses with each Soviet camera I bought.

Of course most of the lenses did not work well on the cameras they came with either because of factory defects of having been dismantled by previous users who did not know how to put them back together. And then, the specifications of the camera and lens were often off the tolerance levels, so a good lens would not focus to infinity of a good camera would not allow the lens to go on perfectly.

My Zorki suffers from the latter.

Therefore, I decided to fit a mechanically sound Industar -22 on the Zorki and figure out how I can make it focus correctly at 1 meter and at infinity.

It was slightly off-focus on both of these distances, so shimming could be a solution. But the Industar-22 lens is not easy to shim, so I attempted the unorthodox approach of taking the camera’s lens mount out and try to play with the lens’s rear element to the camera distance.

… I was glad it rained for many days non-stop in Arizona, as I cannot recall how many improvisations I made to adjust that distance.

Somehow, it worked.

So, here is my Zorki. I also improvised a yellow tinted glass cover (using the tube sleeve of a ball pen) on the rangefinder window – now focusing is easier with the increased contrast.

Given the desert sun of Arizona, no camera lens performed well without a hood. So I made a hood out of a metal tube and fived it to the aperture ring. Now it is much easier to change the apertures, the lens will not suffer from flair, and the images are expected to be more contrasty and higher definition.

The hood has a red dot (made with a drop of nail polish) to match the aperture numbers on the lens.

 Now it was time to test if my modifications work! But I needed to increase the suspense by rolling into a canister about 12 frames of B&W film that had expired about 25 years ago… Here is the film can (suggested expiration date shown as 2005) and I think that I still have about 10 meters of pellicule left in there for future experimentation.

 

Ok, here is the test.

It was high noon and Downtown Prescott had started the festivities for Labor Day.  Before walking around in the crowd, a quick lunch seemed appropriate. As I was looking at the chef prepare sandwiches, I thought the first frame of my test film strip should be the combination of low shutter speed and full lens aperture. I had never used slow speeds on any of my Soviet cameras because I did not trust that they really worked.  All my shots (and I have miles of negatives’ strips to prove) have been either at 1/100 sec of 1/200 sec always with ASA 100 film. This time, I set the shutter speed to 1/25^th sec and the lens aperture to 2.5, the widest opening on an Industar-22.

It was quite dark, so I focused on the light fixtures to see how the depth-of-field will work. And as I was about to press down the shutter, a cook peeked out of the window in the cooking room! Probably someone told him "Check this out -- there is a strange man at the front table with an antique camera. And, in our hamburger restaurant, he ordered a grilled Portobello sandwich!"

Ah, the unexpected joys of street photography.

Surprisingly, the photo came out better than I expected (the 1/25th sec shutter works!) and has that vintage feel to it.

And the look of the cook in the window just made the photo!

Next, a street magician provided the opportunity to test the 1/100 sec speed but I had the aperture at f8 which resulted in an under-exposed shot. However with a full 60 seconds of light exposure under my 1950s Hansa Pro enlarger, I got a reasonably good definition photo but with a delightful contrast. The photo at the top of this posting exhibits rather pleasant tonal range transitions of gray and the underexposed frame resulted in a lot of grain with the long exposure under the enlarger.

But the photo of the magician also came close to the concept of Chiaroscuro primarily used in Renaissance paintings -- a mix of light and shade that resulted in a tri-dimentional feeling with the blurry background.

 

I finally wanted to see how the sharpness of the Industar-22 holds at infinity. The photo below was cropped to emphasize what the lens can do if I had used an aperture of f8 or f11. Instead I used a wider f5.6 which washed away all tonal transitions.

In summary, the shimming worked, although I am not sure why. I have always preferred the coated Industar-22 to the uncoated Leica Elmar, and I will continue to use it.

At the end of this experiment, I felt like I had lived in a time bubble for a day. Expecting a 1955 Zorki to perform like a 1954 Canon L would be akin to taking a 1938 VW beetle to the Paris-Dakar Rally and hoping it would run for a 100 meters in the sand.

But what a joy it once was to drive that VW through the Chitta Vecchia in Bari, Italy!

 

September 4, 2022

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022