[Originally published on 35mmc.] I’m a street photographer with a preference for manual-focus 50mm-equivalent lenses. I got my start with a Zeiss Contax rangefinder (w/ 50mm Sonnar f/1.5) and Pentax MX SLR (w/ 50mm SMC Pentax-M f/1.7), and loved the compact size, minimal feature set,

[Originally published on 35mmc.] The Industar-69 (Индуста́р-69) is a strange but beguiling beast. Originally designed for the Chaika (Чайка) camera, it wasn’t really meant to be used with other cameras. The original Chaika’s lens wasn’t removable; on later models it was affixed with an M39 thread,

[Originally published on 35mmc.] I had the good fortune to be wandering the Kazimerz neighborhood of Krakow, Poland, on a Saturday morning, where I stumbled upon a small but very interesting flea market. An American child of the 80s, I’ve always been fascinated with Soviet artifacts, and their cameras