The Moskva 5 is a big Soviet made camera, which follows forms and performance of the most renowned folding Zeiss Super Ikonta. Snap 6×9 cm frames and 6×6 through a special removable mask. For the technical specifications of the camera back to the previous test readers: here and here. This time, taking advantage of a typical winter day, I wanted to use it in its native format, for large negatives (if any) to print.
It’s been love at first sight: she was large and heavy but it gave me a feeling of solidity and undeniable power. She went home with her beautiful Sekor C 90mm f/3.8 lens, a Vivitar duplicator and two SDPro backs, (one for 220) but she felt a bit lonely and I proceeded immediately to add Sekor C 50mm f/4.5 and 180mm f/4.5. At that point, I was ready to fight a war. The only problem is that such equipment can fight mainly in the studio photography, because to use it outdoors things get complicated struggle. And so, the time has passed (almost two years), until a few days ago …
Being (among other things) a fan of cameras and their respectable lenses, made behind the Iron Curtain , long ago I had the opportunity to enrich my vintage “arsenal” with a beautiful Pentacon Six Tl, fitted with its Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar 80mm f/2.8 standard lens, wlf and metered pentaprism with angled eyepiece (and diopter correction). The camera is truly remarkable aesthetic and mechanical conditions, but a first test roll gave so many problems that I thought of having to make another to correct some of my errors in the loading of the film and in the development of the same. In the meantime, I ordered a new focusing screen with split image on Araxfoto site. Following the instructions on the Pentaconsix site (which I highly recommend for any info about these cameras), a few days ago I loaded a Ilford HP5+ film and started my hunting for satisfactory images. But …. things do not always go as we would like …
A small (and lightweight) plastic parallelepiped, a not so sophisticated lens (plus another for framing), a focus ring, one dial for setting the apertures and another for shutter times, a cocking lever for the shutter, a winding knob for the film and a trigger lever. The Lubitel 166U is all here. A Soviet medium format TLR, produced at Lomo Fabrik during the eighties. After all, to take photographs we need just a few things (and sometimes even less, as we shall see in the future), but when you come back from a weekend and realize that you missed (technically speaking) just one of 12 frames, you continues to be a bit surpised.
It has been a busy Sunday the last one. With much satisfactions but also some minor problems. I went with my youngest son to visit a natural reserve and since I had decided to “travel” light, I had with me only the small Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 (Click on the link to see more about it), the Pentax Spotmeter III, two filters and just a couple of film rolls. The first one I used, after more than thirty years (in fact I had already used it another time, but was lab-developed) was Ilford FP4 +, while the second was the Ilford HP5 + (and this, really , for the first time).
thefilmrenaissance 