FED Zarya Camera Test

A sort of cut-down version of the FED-2D, the Zarya (Dawn) has no rangefinder or self-timer. My particular camera came from the first production group, Model Ia. It had a bit of green on the top cover, but that cleaned off. I had to adjust the second shutter curtain, as it was dragging a bit, and it looks like I may have to give it one more tweak.

Turns out there is a light leak, too. It comes from the bottom somewhere in the take-up spool area, so I'll have to give that a look with a flashlight around the body in a dark room.

I just drove around after loading the camera with Kodak Gold 200, and mounting an Industar-22 3.5/50 lens, taking care not to engage the Infinity Lock so it wouldn't foul on the camera body. I used a push-on Bel-View hood to shade it from the sun angles. It was actually for the early series of Ricoh TLRs which take 36mm push-on accessories, but turned out to not have too severe of a viewing angle as to vignette the images.

I took along my Nikon P7700 to shoot comparison photos, and also just in case the Zarya crapped out on me, I'd at least have some photos of the trip. But other than the light leak, the camera functioned well. Scale focusing took a bit more time, as not only did I have to determine distance by sight, I had to convert that to metric. Not really all that hard to do, but you have to get it right.

This will be a good second body to have in my FSU line of cameras, once I get all the deficiencies ironed out. It handles nicely, and the removable back makes film loading so much easier than in the Zorki 1. It's a bit larger than that Barnack bodied clone, but not in a bad way.

I didn't do as well on exposures as I would have liked. Had to do quite a bit of cropping too, to eliminate the leak in some of the frames. Post-processing was done in PS Elements 10.

PF