Tint­a­gel- Mosk­va 5

Published Categorised as History, Photography, Travel, UK No Comments on Tint­a­gel- Mosk­va 5

 

2s.jpg

My ex-boyfriend’s family used to go to Corn­wall every summer, and we used to join them, me usually lugging a whole load of photo stuff on the train down. These were taken at Tint­a­gel.

1s.jpg

4s.jpg

After we’d been round the castle, we were having a look round the book­shop in the village, which was a strange combin­a­tion of normal book­shop, ice cream shop and hippy shop (lots of tour­ists there for King Arthur), when an Itali­an man asked the owner/​assistant/​whatever if they had a fancy edition of the Morte D’Arthur for a gift for a friend who was an English Profess­or. The shop person said that they didn’t have one, and told him he should buy Mists of Avalon instead and then went on and on about how it was more mystic­al and femin­ine and how every­one should read it, despite the Itali­an man politely trying to get a word in edge­ways to try to explain that it wasn’t what it was look­ing for at all, and his friend was a special­ist in Medi­aev­al English, so he’d prefer some­thing actu­ally from the peri­od please. It was pretty funny, but also made you want to bang your head into a wall.

3s.jpg

The Mosk­va 5 is possibly the world’s most awkward camera. I got mine in a junk­shop in Tallin for about £15, and it looks amaz­ing however. It weighs a ton and must be used with a tripod. It doesn’t take the normal tripod screws though, some special larger soviet size instead, so I had to get an adaptor off ebay, which tends to get jammed onto my tripod easily. You also need to use a shut­ter release to fire the shut­ter, because the button is useless (accord­ing to the inter­net, the buttons pretty much never work) and the rangefind­er for focus­ing and the view­find­er for compos­ing are totally differ­ent windows. It seems they star­ted off design­ing the camera for left-handed use and then changed their mind halfway through for extra awkward­ness. If you have the rect­an­gu­lar mask in you only get 5-6 pictures per roll of 120 film, and you need a hand­held light meter, as there’s no built in one When I’ve got the thing on the tripod with the shut­ter release hanging off and both hands reach­ing round and peer­ing from one window to the other and hold­ing the light meter up I feel like I might as well go the whole hog and get a black hood and pan full of magnesi­um powder (and a ‘tache to curl). The film I used that day had also been in a hot car, hence the strange marks. I should get round to using this camera again, I think it’s the only time I’ve ever used it. I’d actu­ally scanned these before, but the film had curled up, and now it’s been pressed flat for a couple of years, so I got much better results.

5s.jpg

Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.