Lomography

More articles by the same author

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  pan_dre's Shopping Guide Welcome to the first installement of pan_dre's shopping guide, your source for all the happings around lomography.com's online shop.

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  Zenit 11 gallery - Balos, Greece My favourite camera breaking into in pieces right before my trip to Balos, Greece could have turned into a complete photo-disaster but, lucky me, I ended up giving my Zenit 11 SLR a go.

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  Deadstock Tale by grimbyname: Smena Symbol In the summer of 2006, while doing a bit of mindless web wandering, I discovered the weird and wonderful community of film-addicted lomographers, and wanted to join in. Looking through the homes and shop, while waiting for a Fisheye 2 to arrive, it didn't take me long to discover that I already possessed a bona-fide lomographic Russian deadstock tool, a Symbol bought for me by my father in the early eighties. He was a keen amateur photographer, owning both Zenit and Praktica SLRs, a Zorki 4K rangefinder, all with a variety of lenses, and his own black and white darkroom kit too. For some reason he'd decided to buy a Symbol each for me and my mother, most probably because they were cheap, about £8 if I remember correctly. I already had a Fed 4 (a 'proper' camera with coupled rangefinder and built-in light meter) that my parents had bought me for being a smart lad for passing my 11-plus exam for the grammar school, so the Symbol, UK branded as Cosmic rather than Smena, saw little use, and I don't even know if any pics remain from its early days. Smena means 'Young Generation', which is when I first became acquainted with the Symbol. Cosmic sounds rather fantastical, spacey even, or perhaps an exclamation from a zoned-out hippy. No matter, I'm not afraid to admit to having been all those things at one time or another. And the photographic evidence of much of that is hopefully locked in a secure vault somewhere. Anyway, I digress.