www.benlovejoy.com
| Photography | Lubitel 166 |
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Much as I would love to own a Hasselblad, I would never shoot film often enough to justify the purchase. So I satisfy my occasional yearnings for medium format film photography with this: a Lubitel 166. It is a Russian copy of a Voigtlander, a German camera based on a 1920s design. It cost me £27 on ebay. :-) The Lubitel is totally manual, and has no metering. To wind on the film, you keep winding until the next number appears in the darkened window. To focus, you flip up a magnifying glass and stare at a tiny focusing plane in the viewfinder - as you adjust the viewfinder lens, so the cog arrangement adjusts the film lens. It is real back-to-basics photography, and that's the fun of it.
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| The camera takes 120 roll-film, and the negatives are 6x6cm - three times the size of a 35mm negative. Which is why MF cameras like Hasselblads and Bronicas are so much better quality than SLRs when it comes to huge enlargements. The Lubitel's is not in Hasselblad league, and the lens in particular is quite crude. Even so, the quality isn't at all bad:
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