Very nice shots, nothing wrong with that camera. What is it like to operate?
It's rather massive. Very heavy. Maybe a bit unwieldy as a weapon.
As a camera... the front-mounted shutter button has a long throw with a good bit of resistance, but that said it's a very smooth shooter. The first pic above was shot at 1/2 sec (I think closer to 1 sec in reality) handheld and I noticed very little mirror slap or vibration. The fan shutter operates almost like a leaf shutter and is likewise relatively vibration-free.
The selenium cell seems to be alive but not accurately so (it actually is oversensitive to light based on the readings it gives) and its automatic coupling to the lens aperture doesn't work, so I use it as a manual camera. Shutter speeds are 1/2 to 1/1000 sec plus bulb, and in my example seem pretty accurate.
The aperture control works through a dial on the front of the body -- well it works on the 50mm that came with it and the 85mm Jupiter I got separately, but not on the 20mm Mir. The aperture control tab on the lens moves freely but something seems to be impeding the rotational movement of the mechanism inside the mount that rotates the tab. So all those shots above were shot wide open. But I'd like to be able to shoot, say f8, so have been working on trying to fix it. I've eliminated a number of things it could be but it remains a mystery. I've taken a file and hammer to it (the hammer was on a bent bayonet retaining spring so that doesn't count). Next tool I'm gonna try is a sickle.
However, through my efforts (or not), I could get the aperture to move from closed down when it was re-mounted to wide open using the dial -- it just wouldn't operate properly like the other lenses where it stops down with a press of the shutter. Once I turn the dial to a setting, it stays there. So I figured, Good, just need to guesstimate the f-stop by looking at the aperture and leave it there. It's unaffected by firing the shutter.
But then I noticed the aperture would open and close a bit sort of randomly and then I finally realized that I was accidentally turning the front lens element when I was un-mounting and re-mounting the lens, and that turning the front lens element (it seems to not really tighten) I could open and close the aperture -- without having to re-mount the lens!
So, yeah, it works great!
It's funny. There is interest in these lenses, especially the 20mm Mir and 85mm Jupiter, because they are relatively cheap since they have this weird mount, often a good deal cheaper than the m42 versions. So people want to know how to adapt them to digital cameras, but the main problem is there is no way to adjust the aperture because it lacks an aperture ring. But the front lens element is the aperture ring! (Not sure if this is universal.)
