Someone once said,”If you cant find inspiration with the things around you, look for the unusual” Unfortunately, that didn’t work for me over the past couple of days and so I decided that I would simply take photos of metal things! I had a couple of disappointing shots but it kept me occupied and away from the house for a bit.

I have recently installed a ‘flocking’ kit to my Kiev 60 as the light can be so intense here that I was occasionally experiencing flare on some images.There are a couple of well known issues with the Kiev 60. One is lighter patches occurring on the image and the other is a thin line on the images. The lighter area on the frame is caused by reflections inside the camera body between lens and focal plane shutter.

Vertical light lines are caused by light reflected onto the film by the film guide rolls. These lines generally are at distance of 27mm or 17mm either side of the image. This is exactly the distance between the film aperture and film guide rollers. This problem gives thin, sharp lines. More diffuse lines may be caused by light leaks between the shutter curtains.

I was determined to prevent these issues. Hence the flocking kit! This appears to work very well or so I thought. I took two images with my 180mm Sonnar lens fitted and focussed to it’s closest distance. The resulting images both had a light patch the full frame from top to bottom, At this time, it appears to be a peculiarity of the lens which I have not experienced with shots taken over greater distances.

I shot these photos on Delta 100 rated at ISO 80 and developed the film in Spur HRX. The film and developer produce images with exceptionally fine grain. As a result, I was able to drastically crop the two images taken with the 180mm lens. The remaining images were shot using the standard Volna-3 80mm F2.8 lens.

I realised after developing the film that I had over agitated it for the first minute! However, the results were a testimony to how forgiving the film and developer are!

A sample of this ‘shoot’ are attached.