New old camera FED-4

I’m still enjoying taking photos and still wincing everytime I get the bill for processing a roll. The diana is great but in a lot of ways your limited to what you can do especialy when you get the fear.

The fear is a strange beast its caused by taking pictures in low light with a diana. Basically the diana is terrible in low light so much so you fear that your entire film will come back blank a few months back i got 3/12 back, I didn’t want to take another film in low light for weeks after that. So the answer to this I surmised was to get a 35mm camera the film is cheaper and you get more shots per roll best of all I would go for a camera with a lens that wasn’t photo-phobic.

Some quick hunting around for second hand places my friend had recently picked up a olympus XA from a  place in town described as “A small room full of cameras you have to get buzzed into”.  Classic Photographics is what you imagine an independent second hand camera shop should be, the guy persumably the owner was great help managing to give me a few cameras to choose from that met the criteria “35mm rangefinder that was interesting”. After a bit of haggling i was the proud owner of of a FED-4 and paid in cash. Of course they didn’t accept anything else…

Shooting

The FED-4 is a russian rangefinder loosly based on the leica cameras of the time. It looks amazing everything is mechanical bar the light meter that runs on science and it weighs about as much as a fully loaded 4 door  family saloon. Oh and it came with a lovley (matching) leather case at no extra charge!

For my first roll I decided to go for some ISO 400 fim because ISO 400 was what I was used to and mainly because I had ‘The Fear’ having no idea how the camera would perform. The best part was the light meter only going upto ISO 320 so i had to kinda gustimate the calibration.

But as luck would have it  I manged to shoot some passible shots in daylight and some blurry stuff at a gig not too terrible considering I was expecting 100% of the gig shots to come back blank.

Camera Manual Links

If you have a FED-4 you might find the following handy:

http://www.cameramanuals.org/russian_pdf/fed_4.pdf
http://www.marriottcameras.co.uk/instruct3/fed4/with_pictures.htm