week 10: hi, i'm a fed 3!

so i recently got a fed 3 camera, which is an ukrainian rangefinder camera inspired by classic leicas. it was probably produced sometime in the 1960s. the story of how i got this camera is a little sad, so i won’t bother you with it. instead i’ll tell you about my first roll of film with this camera.

since this is an old camera, there was no user manual. but i found scans of the original handbook with english translation online – thanks internet! :)
loading a film into the camera was a bit unusual to me, since you have to take out the take-up spool, but eventually it was not that hard. i decided to use a black & white film for my first test, because i figured there might be a lot of blur or over/underexposed pictures in my first roll and those don’t look as bad in black&white as they would in color.

the fed 3 has no built-in lightmeter, you have to pick shutterspeed and aperture otherwise. i did take a look at some charts about exposure time and aperture before shooting, but ended up shooting mostly by intuition.

it was a sunny day and i went for a little walk in my neighbourhood. once again i ended up at the new music theatre in linz and shot half of the film there. i just love to take abstract architectural pictures.