Old beaters

I have two great obsessions in life – books and cameras. When I was doing my taxes for last year and adding up all the receipts, I realized that in 2006 I spent about $400 on books and close to $9000 (that nine thousand) on camera equipment, printing and processing. The cost of camera equipment did not surprise me much – cameras and especially good lenses come with pretty hefty price tags. What did surprise me is the amount I spent on books. Considering that I mostly buy used books that cost, on average, between 2 and 5 dollars, $400 is a lot of money.

However, I am getting off the subject. One of the things I love about photography is going to yard sales and thrift stores and finding old junky cameras, fixing them and actually using them to take pictures. When I went to Belarus and Ukraine in May of 2006 I ended up buying 8 old Soviet-made cameras – different models of Zenit and FED. Since normally I’m pretty busy, I’ve only gotten around to fixing some of them. The following photographs were taken with a 30-year-old FED 5. I replaced the light seal around the film door, but I guess I need to do some more work around the lens. On the bright side, the light leak did produce some rather cool effects.