As I mentioned in my update podcast a few weeks ago, I lost my Industar 69 while shooting a performance art event in Harajuku. It wasn’t an expensive lens, but it was one of my two favourite adapted vintage lenses (the other is my Canon FD 135mm f/2.5 — a very different sort of lens). Luckily, at about $100 including shipping from Kyiv, it also isn’t an expensive lens, so once I’d accepted that I wasn’t going to get it back (I don’t think gallery I lost it in looked very hard for it, to be honest), I counted my pennies and bought another. It arrived two weeks ago.
The risk here is that these vintage Soviet lenses had horrible quality control, which means that each copy of this little guy has slightly different visual idiosyncrasies. Luckily, I think I came off okay and the replacement lens seems to be better than the original. Or at least, I prefer the new idiosyncrasies to the old.
I finally got a chance to test this lens out last weekend while picking mulberries with Rodger Sono and co. in Yokohama. Normally, I like to do a fair bit of processing, but for the sake of really seeing how this lens performed, these are posted SOOC, or Straight Out Of Camera, as we say.
(The photo at the top of this post is from this past weekend. We were in Hakone and the guest house found out about my son’s birthday and left us this little card and origami crane on his pillow.)
