My passion for photography is something that everyone who is around me will know about, but how did it start in the first place? Few people know that I was encouraged by my father to take up photography as a hobby but how did my father get interested in photography?

I found the answer to this question a few days ago when I found an old Russian Camera and two books on photography. All of them were around 25 - 30 years old, and they belonged to my father.

Upon further research, I found out that the camera was a 35mm rangefinder called Zorki manufactured at the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Factory in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1978. The particular model which I had was the Zorki 4 which was first released in 1956 and over 2 million units were produced. The Zorki 4 was the most successful Zorki and has a reputation as one of the best Russian cameras although the self-timer and slow shutter speeds were unreliable.

The camera isn’t functioning perfectly right now. When I press the shutter button, the shutter plane moves halfway through and stops and the moves slowly. The self-timer works perfectly, and the camera is entirely mechanical, it doesn’t require batteries to function. The lens is quite remarkable too, with a focal length of 50mm and fast aperture of f/2.

I hoped that the camera might be worth something given its antique status but I was disappointed to find out that it’s not worth more than 75$ because there are around 1.7 Million pieces in existence even today. Well, maybe after a few more years, it might be worth something more.

The books are the best photography books I’ve ever read. The Digital Photography Books you get in the shops today don’t even give a quarter of the information in these books. And since these books were written with Film Cameras in mind, its interesting to know the real origin of some of the principles of digital photography today. The books have certainly taught be a great deal of the technical details and basics of photography.

 The first book is The Focalguide to Cameras and the second one is The Focalguide to Photographing People.

Click the thumbnails for fullsize images.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Books, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.