If we look in the Cambridge dictionary we see that ‘zenith‘ means: The best, highest, or most successful point or time. Another definition is a point in the sky that is directly above the observer. This should be a good name for some products. One of them, or maybe the only one so well known, is Zenit cameras…
Oh wait! maybe I am wrong and the most known might be the St. Petersburg football club, and according to John there is a well known window company in England. Even though it might not be the best known, I will still write about a Zenit camera, more specifically the Zenit-e.
I am not writing about the history of the brand, but just about our own story with this heavy machine that brought us a bunch of emotions.
Many years ago my dad used to spent a lot of his time on different mountains climbing with his students and even though he needed to carry a super heavy bag (at that time sleeping bags were heavy, the tents at least four times heavier too) he always found space for the 1.15kg Zenit-e camera. I don’t know when he got it, but the Zenit-e was produced between 1965 and 1986. My last memory of using it was over 20 years ago and I remember we already also had a Minolta, very light and easy automatic camera (but still with film). After that came some digital cameras and the ‘oldy’ was safely ‘hidden’ until a couple of months ago.
Taking Polaroid pictures gave us the idea to check if the old Zenit-e is still working. Actually we were buying a film for our Polaroid camera and just got the cheapest roll of film (2.5 Euro) in the shop. We thought that if it doesn’t work we don’t want to waste our money.
My dad helped me to remember how to load the film and explained a bit about the settings of the camera and it was ready for use! It was just I already forgotten what it means to use such a camera…
Yes, yes, yes the hardest part is not actually taking a picture, or the weight of carrying it around, but to wait until all the shots will be taken and the film sent away to be developed, and not to be able to see the picture on the screen before it is actually printed. It is not the easiest thing to wait and wonder not being sure if there will be a positive result. So sometimes we were taking the camera out with us and taking pictures trying not to have high expectations about the results.
And finally it was the last shot! I was super happy, I just didn’t realise that it would take even longer than I expected to see or not to see (if the camera was broken) the pictures. I needed to carefully take out the film, avoiding the light and to bring it to the nearest photo shop. The next day we did it and… We found out that they don’t develop the photos in the nearest city anymore (there were five places before and now there is nothing). I got a kind of shock actually, but what we could do? Yep, to wait for the next week and come back again to pick our pictures, and then only if they were a success of course.
And finally the day came!
We had an envelope with the film and possible the pictures inside! I was even quite nervous to open it, because I really wanted to see the nice pictures and didn’t want to be disappointed. After asking how much we should pay we realized that we definitely have some pictures, maybe not all, but still better than nothing!
I believe we both were very surprised and incredibly happy about our real paper pictures. we got 20 out of 24 great pcitures back which feels like such a good result! Really amazing colors and clear focus!
Now we are going to buy some more films and again we won’t bother to buy the most expensive, because we know that this camera is very good and the film is not the most important. Of course it is not digital and you can’t just delete and retake hundreds of versions of each shot. So, just the same as taking Polaroid pictures each time we will take a moment longer thinking and trying to make a nice memory of our adventures.