This episode's about a big Russian Cold War Era Camera and my attempts to make friends with it.
My gear and film reviews are a little different. I don't have much to say about Technical Specs. Sooner or later, nothing replaces being there and using your equipment to try to create a compelling image.
This part of my own journey is about buying a camera made in Kiev during the cold war because I could afford one and everything else medium format was scary expensive. Also, it just seemed so different and I wanted creativity in my photography.
It's not big because it's Cold War Russian, but it is ugly because it's Cold War Russian. Ugly is the wrong word. How about practical? Utilitarian? Honestly I think it looks cool. It looks like the era and the country it came from.
It is a medium format camera which means it takes much bigger pictures than a 'regular' 35 mm camera. Bigger film=bigger camera. It handles just like any film SLR. It is surprisingly lightweight for it's size and even the dials are oversized plastic nobs that make it feel almost toy-like.
For someone who has huge hands like me, it is a dream to use.
Back in 2015 I liked buying Russian cameras from the Ukraine (via ebay). The dealers were nice and all super honest. They make sure to clean up, refurbish, and test what they send you. Then they follow up to make sure you're happy with it. I'm sure they are still fantastic. I just noticed less than a decade later they have tripled in price. Likely this is as much due with the humanitarian crisis happening there as it is the resurgence in popularity of film.
First Time Out with the Kiev 6C
When I first received my camera I did the worst thing you can do with a new camera: I took it to a historic reenactment.
Now, reenactments are awesome. Those and festivals (Ren Faire, MegaCon etc.) are my favorite places to photograph people because they're all dressed really cool and like being photographed. They have poses already in the queue to depict the characters they are playing. But anything "live" like that is fast paced and no place to try out new gear.
I was fumbling with the camera the entire first roll. I was not paying close attention to composition or what was in the background. Loading the film was an epic saga and I felt very clumsy. You should never feel awkward photographing people. It kills the vibe quick.
Worse I got the wild hair to photograph with Ilford Delta 3200 film. It made sense at the time since I was nervous about shooting handheld with such a big camera and I knew medium format has a very narrow focus plane. There's no shooting too slow at 3200 ISO. I thought, since the negatives were so big, grain would not be much of an issue.
It was.
That's not a slam on Ilford 3200. It's one of my favorite films. It's just for certain situations and has to be used deliberately. I was just shooting it as an ordinary black and white film and between that and not concentrating on composing because I was fumbling with a new camera I didn't like the first roll too much.
Moving through the roll I saw this image of children playing on a grassy knoll. You won't see this one in any galleries but there's something about it. The elaborateness in the detail. It's grainy but the rendering works. I cropped it showing only the children.
Oh yeah. That's Ilford Delta 3200 grain all right, but the details are all there in a way it would not be with a crop on my regular 35mm camera. Individual blades of grass clearly defined. It didn't turn into a blur of square pixels like a digital camera would. I always liked film. With medium format, there's a lot more film to like.
I reloaded the camera with color. At the other end of the ISO spectrum, I used Kodak Ektar 100.
In the hopes that you non technical types have not already bailed, the lower the ISO, the finer the grain. Compare the picture above to the one below this paragraph. You get the idea.
Photos were handheld, but I was starting to get the hang of holding the camera steady. Later when I scanned the film, I noticed that each picture was 50 Megapixels. That's big now. Back then it was out of reach for a prosumer digital camera.
Cropping the photo above to just see the skull, what attracted me most was pictures don't deteriorate on enlargement like they do with digital. Details just get softer, still looking good in print if you don't have your nose up against it. No matter how big you print.
Then came the hook that got me addicted to medium format photography. That 3-D look. The way the lens transitions from the focus plane to the out of focus background of the image.
Now Kodak Ektar 100 has it's own quirks as a film. One you may have already noticed is it can render fair skin tones red. But overexpose out in the full sunlight, and the detail can be stunning.
I know you can't tell from whatever screen your viewing this on, but I could print the above large enough to fill a wall, and it would look the same without degrading quality. You would feel like you could step into it.
First time out, two rolls of film, and I had created with this camera things I had never done with much more expensive digital cameras.
I was hooked.
Practicing
I began running it through its paces. Experimenting with composition and focus. Ektar can have weird color shifts. The shifts can be weirder and harder to account for with Soviet era lenses that were really only meant to shoot black and white film.
I experimented with this a lot trying to use the color shift, combined with Ektar's bold rendering, to make photographs a digital camera would just not want to do. Something different. A unique look.
Here's the thing: When you're making friends with a digital camera, the relationship is between you and the lens. A pixel is a pixel and a modern sensor is a sensor. That's it. Adobe Photoshop curves do the same thing as Affinity Photo or Corel Photopaint curves.
With film photography your exposing a chemical coated sheet to light. Each type of film has its own unique chemistry. You're working the material. That's why I like it.
Now Kodak Ektar 100 is a saturated film. Expose it at box speed, and it can be very warm. Making reds pop and greens vibrant. It was developed to replace not only slide film, but the slide film: Kodachrome. It is its own thing not much like Kodachrome but I like that it can be just as quirky. Underexpose it and it comes out blue. I mean really blue.
Let it Flow
Working late one night at my day job, a co-worker and I were tasked with painting photo-realistic globes on some large canvas balls. This coworker is a talented painter and accomplished artist. I a meticulously precise craftsman.
Meticulous Craftsman in painting terms means "too stiff".
Exasperated my coworker burst out, "Let it flow! The paint will do what you want it to!"
I shot and re-shot bad photos with my Kiev/Ektar combo until I started to flow.
I learned to make colors saturated in bright Florida sunlight.
Rebelling against the typical postcard sunsets with super saturated colors, I endeavored to capture what I saw, trying to share the experience of being there, instead of enhancing it.
Some things I could never get to work. I got an ultrawide lens to add drama to one of my favorite spots on Lake Eustis. Trying to make the myriad waterlilies look like they stretched on forever.
But one of my favorite bachelor fantasies, living in one of the mobile homes near this spot...I could never get the color or composition quite right.
I tried different films for night photography, but always came back to Ektar. Don't think, just open the shutter and let the scene play. Even the main street in a small town looked electric.
Just as interesting as the super saturated colors, I liked the more reserved photos too. Some say Ektar is for bright sunlight, but I loved the soft pastels of a cloudy day.
I learned that if you underexposed a hair, the colors could be super-saturated.
Moments later, same spot, overexpose a hair and it's a different scene.
I continued to be blown away by the detail. I went crazy and started scanning at 100 Megapixels. See that squiggly black arrow in the photo above? Look closely and it's pointing at a small white dot.
Zoom in on the head of that arrow and you can see clearly the little white dot is a feather. With this setup I could print anything I wanted any size I wanted.
But mostly it's about the creativity. Eastern block cameras don't have the creamy bokeh (pretentious word for how lenses render the blurred out of focus parts of your picture) with the cute little round bubbles of Japanese cameras, they have a rougher appearance. I began to refer to my main lens as my "Van Gogh" lens because of coarse brush stroke appearance in the background foliage of a photo like this park bench.
Conclusion
If you like your plastic Lomography camera, be it Holga, Diana, or you like something here and want to implement it into your own photography , I encourage you to give the Kiev 6C a try. Read up on them but don't flip out too much. They are actually well built cameras. They can be a little clunky first time out, but that's more the medium format photography curve. Just look out. Once you try medium format, you might find it hard to go back to anything else.
