ZinchukFilms: The Blog

When Sasha was last in Ukraine, his dad gave him his old FED 5B camera.  His dad bought it in 1977 just before Sasha was born.  Sasha has memories of his dad taking pictures with it and then developing the film and making prints in a homemade darkroom.  When Sasha brought the camera back to the US, we figured it was a novelty, but when we took a look we realized it took regular 35mm film and on Thanksgiving day we decided to test it out.

The FED camera was named for Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinskiy, the founder of the Soviet state security agency “Cheka” which later became the KGB.  The FED 1 was first built in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1934.  Their design is based upon German Leica cameras.  The FED 5B was built from 1977 through the mid-1990s.  They are no longer made today.

The camera operates on manual–there are controls for aperture and shutter speed. We bought Kodak 400 ISO film.  We played around with our Canon 5D mkII to help us with the settings (since we’d never used a film camera on manual before).  We were shocked with the results!! Below you see a candid shot of Nikita taken on the 5D (top) and the FED 5B (bottom).  Both are straight out of the camera:

I love the film tint of the FED 5B and the soft focus it has.  Here’s another example from Thanksgiving dinner:

This time the FED 5B is on the top while the Canon 5D mkII is on the bottom.  The digital camera is sharper, but there’s something very appealing to the film look.

The next day, we had fun going to the park to take some family pics with the camera–its low-light as well as bright-light capabilities are great!!

Jennifer and Nikita

Even Sasha got in on the action!

(all pics straight out of the camera!)