capturing moments with contraptions

In my defense, I only missed a day because I didn't sleep the night before and I was exhausted and then I had the more important things of the day to worry about. But now, behold, I write.

This is a box. It contains a deconstructed Zenit E single lens reflex camera built in the Soviet Union in 1976. I am repairing it. Well, I mean this in an ad perpetuum kind of way. This photo was taken in May 2011 and I have made approximately 1 repair since, and I don't really know how to put it back together so that it works again, and all the repair manuals are in Russian. Anyway. My happy thought for the day is

Cameras

because I quite like them. And not just the newish, take-good-photos kind. I like the old, take-cool-photos kind as well. And I liked them before liking them made you a hipster.

See, what I like about cameras is how they are quite plainly machines, but their purpose is artistic. What's clear from that photo is that an old camera is a very mechanical device. Too mechanical for me to put it back together easily, but also more mechanical than one thinks about when seeing the pictures it takes:

(To be completely honest, this photo was taken using a Zenit 12XP from 1986, a successor to the E and slightly more advanced electronically - i.e. it has electronics - but very similar mechanically. It was also fitted with the lens from an E).

Basically, cameras are awesome for both sides of the brain. They're like music that you can touch. When I don't want to capture little bits of the world on even smaller bits of celluloid, I can be trying to fix something, and that also makes me happy.

Take this Falcon vest pocket camera for instance. Syl found this on Etsy, and when we bought it, it wouldn't even open. After we gradually prized it open, we detached the shutter mechanism at the front from the bellows. Syl did a great job of cleaning the bellows and making sure they didn't stick together much, while I got the shutter firing again. A deceptively complex mechanism. Pushing the shutter lever about 6mm moves a plate with a hole in it. The hole is then lined up with the opening at the front, but light is blocked by a second plate. The two plates are connected by an angled spring. When the first plate is moved, the spring is contorted to exactly the right point at which it decompresses itself by rotating. As it does so, it also rotates the second plate. The second plate has a sausage-shaped hole in it which passes past the opening at the front of the camera. The length of the sausage-shaped hole and the spring constant of the spring determine the length of time it takes for the hole to pass the opening at the front of the camera, and hence the exposure time. Basically, all of that goes into making a photo like those you saw here. Fixing up this camera has been a great little project for Syl and I, especially since we got to take photos with a camera made sometime before 1941. Yay!