20 rolls of 120 and my Zenit-80

[antoniobravo]

Just for the fun...

 

I am back from one week holiday in Aragon region, Spain, where I went specifically for some cultural tourism, focused architecture, mudejar and post-Reconquista, plus a bit of the usual medieval spanish castle in countryside mountain here and there and whatever interesting street shots.

Flight Oslo-Barcelona and highspeed train Barcelona-Zaragoza. Not easy to find 120 film outside big cities usually, so I took 2 packs of Portra 160, 1 pack of Lomography 100, couple rolls of Provia (I develop it in C41 and can have interesting color shifts and tones), some Ilford and Fomapan for BW. And one of my Salyut, a Zenit-80 (this was an export version of Salyut 2nd gen.).

I am used to the Salyut family, I have 2x 2nd. gen. 2x Salyut-S, one modified P6-mount, cloth shutter from Arax, plus one Salyut early 2nd. gen for parts, one disassembled and not re-assembled. Among the usual idiosyncrasies when using these cameras, one, in my experience, is to always really fully depress the shutter button, otherwise there's some probability for jam when you wind on for the next frame.

Bingo, after 6 shots the first day in Zaragoza, I got it, the shutter jam. Just the very first day of my ambitious long awaited travel....

Arrghh, how nice, a bag full of film and a jammed Salyut. No tools no time to seat and unscrew the knob and try the easy fix, just in case.

So next time, I will bring along another body.....

 

(that said, I still could shoot, I brought too a Canon 5D (the "Classic") .... but I forgot to bring a regular prime and no shop around selling old m42 primes, I had just my Mir-20 ultrawide. So I have over thousand 24x36 digital shots in 20mm only. Haha).

 

Few days after that, in Barcelona I went to Casanovafoto and FotoK where I spent lot of time watching some 2nd hand Bronicas and Mamiyas. I was considering to buy a body with prism and lens, but, hell, I have a nice serie of Salyut lenses that can be adapted only Mamiya 645 (focal plane shutter, others are leaf shutter lenses) but 6x4.5 is not for real men, and anyway if I want 6x4.5 I use the adapted Salyut backs and a mask in the viewfinder. Moreover the Salyut is very compact, the unmetered prism is nice, it's all mechanical, simple and reliable, WHEN your fingers aren't distracted or tired. So, after a long meditation, I decided to stick with Salyut. A jam or something unfixable by ownself? no problem, buy another body for 100€. Anyway I have 3 others fully working on my shelves. I buy a body sometimes when I spot a working one for cheap, in a 2nd shop in Moscow, on Avito.ru, on Allegro.pl, on Ebay or anywhere.

Is that addiction?

[steve_gallimore1]

I must repair my Kiev 88, or buy another body.

[antoniobravo]

I must repair my Kiev 88, or buy another body.

 

I must too check the one jammed last week. May be simple. My first try will be to unglue the leatherette of the knob, unscrew and carefully remove the gears, poke around for possible stuck/misaligned gears, the connection to the winding rod. If no luck may have to extract the box from its shell.

 

the Salyut/Kiev is partially similar to the Hasselblad 1600F/1000F, so this may help:

Hasselblad 1000F Repair - A Camera Apart

otherwise general mechanical overview with nice illustrations, for the basics:

Kiev88 Repair Manual | Gear | Shutter (Photography)

 

I like my Zenit-80 so if I can't fix it myself I will send to Ukraine or Russia. Otherwise if it was a Kiev-88 or Salyut-S and I couldn't fix it, I would just buy another body. Yet working bodies alone for sale are less common that whole kits (body+lens+backs).

[tom_chow]

i have the later Kiev-88's - a regular 88, a Hartblei, and a cm. I've never had the shutter release jam that you mentioned, maybe that's because they fixed that issue on the later models?

 

There is something satisfying coaxing a nice image out of these quirky cameras, I mainly use the 88CM with the Zeiss P6 lenses. I had to modify the auto aperture mechanism to accommodate the P6 lenses, so it would achieve proper focus. Once you get these machines working properly, they have a certain satisfaction in use.

 

To be fair, I also have a working Hasselblad 1000f, and it's definitely a nicer camera.

 

I think in general, film photography is an addiction.

[antoniobravo]

well I had the jam only twice, on a Salyut-S and that Zenit-80, but had feebacks of similar jam from other users. Yes, maybe some little bit misalignment corrected between models. The one I disassembled (and never re-assembled fully) is an 88 that I picked for almost nothing just in order to know the beast. The jam on the Salyut-S was easy to fix, the current one on the Zenit-80 I'll see when I have a bit of time.

 

btw. about the Zenit-80: last year, one of the week-end I spend in Sankt-Peterburg I went to see what they had (lenses, cameras, ...) in the second hand shop in Gostiny Dvor. I was bearing the Zenit-80, which created strong interested, they wanted to look closer at it. They told me that this model is highly regarded and sells 3x more expensive that the regular Salyut. Well ...

 

my CM from Araxfoto sees very little use, I bought it just to get an idea, and well I like better the old Salyut. Just that the placement of shutter button and the reinforced mounting plate of the CM are nice, so I was tempted to ask Gevorg Vartanyan about the cost for these mods on the Salyut. I keep the CM also with the idea to buy one of these days some lenses available only in the P6 B-mount (CZJ mostly like the Sonnar). I have Kiev-6S bodies but use much more Salyut because the interchangeable backs.

 

> There is something satisfying coaxing a nice image out of these quirky cameras

 

for me, the motivation for getting back to film was the desire to do the most myself instead of "delegating" to various levels of electronic/software and also somewhat not be dependent of batteries/power source. So indeed when images are nice satisfaction is much higher: it's YOUR image from your natural optical sensors (eyes). brain and hands (from operating the camera to development) not the one computed by some sensor/software combo.