My photo gods are awesome gods.
They giveth…and they taketh away. The are capricious and sometimes reward superstitious processes while making photographs and other times punish for no apparent reason. Such is the nature of the photo gods.
This photo is a case in point. I have recently been running a lot of film through two Soviet cameras. First, a Zorki 4 with a Jupiter 8 lens, and second, a Fed 2 with an Industar lens. Like others I read on the interwebs, I wish these two cameras could have wed. I like the Zorki’s larger viewfinder, in particular. But my copy exposes the film a bit low, so that the bottom is cut off and there is more space between the image and the top sprockets. I can live with that, just remembering it has this quirk.
More troublesome, however, is how ‘fiddly’ the Zorki is, especially after turn the knob on the shutter release to rewind the film. The rewinding works fine, but turning the knob back to the shooting position often doesn’t work as advertised. The film doesn’t catch and advance properly. It doesn’t stop when positioned to take a photo. I have found that if I rewind the film without opening the back, I can usually get it to catch properly. I sometimes lose the first few frames trying to reposition the film back to the beginning.
I encountered this issue when I took several shots of this funnel cake stand at a local fair. These were the first shots on the roll, and I noticed the usual Zorki post-rewind situation. I went through my perhaps superstitious routine of rewinding and starting over. It didn’t seem to work, and the light changed and so I though things were screwed. I also though I had set the exposure wrong.
I was pleasantly surprised when I developed the roll and all but two of the imagers were indeed hosed. There were two that were properly exposed and looked good. After scanning, I realized that the one ‘keeper’ shot I had hoped to capture, the one here, with the stand, the flag and an old dude heading for the porta-potties turned out.
I have been trying, somewhat unsuccessfully for years, to improve my gratitude. So, thank you, photo gods, for providing me with this shot. I will be humble moving forward, because the photo gods may giveth, but the take away in equal measure.