This photo was taken shortly before the start of The Great Race here in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s actually one of the best photos that came out of the Zenit 3m.
Besides the horrific light leak, there were only 13 relatively properly exposed frames on the 36 exposure roll. Several frames were overlapped, and all this occurred in the middle of the roll. The beginning and end of the roll were not exposed. So there are some shutter problems, and some film transport issues.
A gentleman with a Nikon FE walked up to me to congratulate me on being the only other film camera user in the crowd. He said he was too cheap to go digital. As long as he could still get film developed, he’d be shooting film. God bless him – I wonder if he realizes that the places he takes his film digitize to a very low resolution. Like 4 Megapixels. Now, you don’t need a lot, even for an 8×10. I have a very nice 8×10 hanging in my livingroom, from my Olympus C2100UZ (the famous “UZi”), which is only a 2 Megapixel camera.
I wouldn’t have any problem replacing the light seals on this Zenit, but the other problems are show stoppers. Cheaper to buy another Zenit off of eBay that to fix this one. However, I don’t think I’m going to playing Russian Roulette trying to find a workable camera.
But I do like the idea of trying some of the Russian lenses, like the Helios 44 family 58mm f/2 lens. However, Nikon cameras have a lens mounting flange to film plane distance that’s too long for most Russian lenses (typically M42 screw mount) that prohibit focusing at infinity without some sort of intermediate lens (that ruins the optical characteristics). So I’m in persuit of a more modern camera with an M42 (a.k.a. Pentax/Praktica screw mount) lens mount.
Stay tuned!