sidemirrorshooting

Sorry for the semi-long hiatus. I was busy preparing my final stages of exit from my current work. which sort of halted a lot of my photography .. erhm…study.

Anyhow. It’s been a month since I acquired my new-old toy. It flew all the way from New York to be greeted with open arms (and a roll of film) by me.

You probably know what I’m talking about when you are following my blog and you know the Russian symbols in my title.

I finally got my Smena/Смена 8m from Mikko. I got the slightly used one with a cute little leather pouchie and everything that the Smena has. (see mangled, photo of my smena below).

My Smena/Смена with all the nifty notes
(canon av-1 + kodak color 200)

This is what you can normally see from a smena camera. (not included in the picture is the back which has the film back,film counter, film advancer, and the film back opener.)

Now, I will try and tell you more about this little toy. This is a Lomo Camera not because it creates Vignettes, blurred effects (although you will even if you don’t want to), create those crazy colors (if you’ve been following this blog closely, you’d know its the slides’ fault and the x-processing). But most importantly it is the deadstock camera manufactured in USSR by the Lomo PLC Factory in St. Petersburg (not the repackaged ones by LSI). What makes this different from the usual stream of “Lomo” (which I will refer to any camera now used in “lomography”) Cameras is it’s unique features that behaves like an actual slr camera. I paid a bargain price of Php 1,500 (less than 40 USD). And It promises “punchy colors” and “sharp focusing” as said in the lomography shop.

Here are some of my personal experiences and lessons learned in handling the Smena. I hope that all would-be Smena mom and dads and already-have Smena babies get to learn from my blunders and triumphs. Here we go…

Of course, the day I got it, a Fuji NPS 160 was loaded immediately and we notice that the film counter was absolutely wrong. Which I was able to “correct” by the RTFM method (Read-The-Fucking-Manual).

The Fix :Before loading the film. Set the film Counter to “0″ (this can be done by turning the wheel) and once the film is loaded, and you advance the film using the winder on the back, notice that the “0″ will turn itself towards “1″ and so on (as long as you don’t turn it on your own). Problem solved. :D

The Smena is manual everything. And I will be blunt. This camera is not for people who are used to point and shoot and pray it looks good cameras. If you want to venture into the whole “lomo” and insists that everything should be made by a fortunate, happy accident, then I’m sorry to say, this camera is probably not for you. I believe to be able to use the Smena 8m to it’s highest advantage you have to know something about the following:

• Aperture
• ASA/ISO
• the power of guestimated focusing

Why only those? Because to help the helpess, LSI made shutter speeds into beautiful nifty weather symbols :D (okay, I’m still a bit on *squee* mode because of the cute little drawings). Which means the following :

• Full Bright Sun - 1/250
• Lined Sun - 1/125
• Lined Clouds - 1/60
• Clouds - 1/30
• Raincloud - 1/15 (don’t be an ass and use it in the rain :P)
• B - for bulb. Yummy Long exposures :)

long exposure with the smena :) (bai held the camera, I pressed the shutter)

For indoors/room shots, do remember to use Cloud/Raincloud :)

Focusing is also done with little people symbols (once again *insert squee sounds here*). It has a range of 1m (approx 3.2 feet) to infinity. I will discuss the focusing technique I did by using my 50mm lens in my Canon AV-1 as a basic (which is near Smena’s 40mm) I use the 50mm lens to focus (since you see it ASAP) and checked where the measure lay, and then used the nearest setting to the Smena.

What’s so beautiful about this Camera is when you hit the target dead on, the clarity is amazing. Like Senior Jollibee here.

But if you didn’t really get it, then you really don’t :D
forgetting to set the focus meter to infinity results in a crappy photo like this one.

And for the punchy colors? I guess this is what it meant :D

So everything relies on the icons, why bother with aperture… Well, to sum it quickly, aperture is the opening of the lens. bigger aperture (smaller number) equals to a bigger hole which equals to more light streaming in, a smaller aperture (a bigger number) equals to a smaller hole.

You might get the shutter speed and focus right, but a wrong aperture would result in this sort of disaster.

Here is me, in Paseo de Santa Rosa, taking a picture of the arcade wall. I set the focus to 1.5(or 2). and to the Cloud symbol (1/30) This is a picture of the wall taken with a f/16 aperture.

Even with a slower shutter speed (meaning more light comes in) it wasn’t enough.

I only realized my mistake when I checked the Aperture ring in front and noticed that the marker is pointed at from 16. So after setting it to a 4. Here’s the shot

This is what I am emphasizing that learning the aperture is important. You could forget the Aperture and just set the ASA to the speed of the film and screw Aperture altogether…but you wouldn’t want that (and this is me going into lecture mode again…:P)

So to make sure you actually shot something decent from the Smena You have to remember these easy steps.

1. Film Loaded Right ? Check!
2. Aperture/ISO/ASA set?
3. Shutter Speed in Correct “weather”
4. Focused Correctly Guestimated?
5. Shutter cocked ? (What the? Yes. you need to cock the shutter to be able to press the release button, this is my most often mistake)
6. Press the Shutter!
7. Don’t forget to rewind (or do forget to if you’re aiming for multiple exposure (just repeat steps 3,4, and 6), I keep advancing the film automatically, force of habit from the Vivitar UW&S.)

So there we have it. Another n00b-like explanation from the level 5(? not sure if I leveled up already) n00b. Here are some of my pictures from the Smena 8m. Hope you enjoyed another lengthy post by yours truly :)

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photos are taken with the smena 8m + kodak bw400cn + fuji nps 160 (expired) + kodak color 200

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