For at least five years I've had two identical broken cameras stowed away in a box. The first was purchased locally as functioning, but was far from it. The biggest problem was the fact that one of the rangefinder mirrors was missing. Then I located a suitable bad looking and cheap working model on ebay, the plan was to swap some parts from the first one. When the second arrived there was a rattling sound inside. Yes, you guessed it; it was the same rangefinder mirror. Not in a mood to try to fix this I stowed them away. Then last year I found a very good repairman in Russia who does wonders to my old communist cameras. This spring I came to think of the two broken cameras, why not send them off for repair and at least get one of them back in working condition. Soon I received an email asking if I would like to have both of them fixed since that was possible. I thought why not, and asked him to replace the skins on the bad one which he did without any extra cost.
So now I just received two nice looking and fully functional LOMO Sokol 2 cameras (Sokol means Falcon). This particular model was made between 1981 and 1987. It is a rangefinder with a fixed lens, an Industar 70, 50mm f2.8. It's got three meter cells on the front of the lens (the earlier models had 6 cells!), and it's got a shutter priority automatic mode. In this mode the shutter won't fire if there is not enough light, but the same does not seem to be the case when there is too much light. You can also put it in manual mode, but you'll have to use an external meter as there is no readout for the built-in meter. I have not been able to locate a users manual for it, but it's pretty straight forward. The ISO settings are quite strange and does not match the most common films today.
Last weekend I took one of them for a test round in the neighborhood. I loaded up a Fomapan 100, set the ISO to 250 as I knew I was going to shoot in a few dark places. I shot the whole roll on automatic and developed it for 200 ISO, adding half a minute. I was expecting the worst, but I was very pleased when I pulled some very nice negatives from the tank. Some were a bit overexposed, but I shot all on 1/60 sec., I should have increased the speed in the bright scenes. I shot some inside a little dark forest with quite challenging and high contrast conditions as you will see.
I thought I would share some of these shots from a camera that came out of the junk box!
