I’ve been on a bit of a rampage with vintage cameras lately. Not content with three “boring” Canon 35mm SLRs, I recently acquired a late 1950s Paxette point’n’shoot and a mid 1950s Conway box camera.
The Conway was my first foray into the world of medium format, and I like it. Only days after developing the first couple of rolls of film from it, my Hana’s dad lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. This takes a slightly different format film: 620 instead of 120 (but that’s a different story).
But I digress. Today Hana and I went to a car boot sale, and I spotted a LOMO Lubitel 166. (cyrillic: ЛОМО Любитель. Means amateur in Russian). I’ve been looking at the Lubitel range and other inexpensive TLRs on eBay for some time, so I snapped it up. Yay for my sixth camera.
It’s in extremely good condition, albeit without the neck strap, lens cap or any other accessories. The glass is scratch-free and shows no signs of fungus. All of the mechanisms appear to work correctly, apart from the self-timer (which counts down, but fails to fire the shutter).
There’s not really much more I can add at this stage, except to say that I plan to get film in it as soon as possible, and the results will be on my photo blog when I’ve found a better method of digitising 120-format negatives than the one I used here..
Jonathan Gazeley 