I Photographed Union Square On a 70-Year-Old Soviet Analog Film Camera
As a professional photographer, I’m always trying to push the boundaries of my skills and try new things that produce interesting photos.
That’s why in 2018, I headed to San Francisco’s Union Square with a peculiar camera, a Lubitel 166 LOMO twin-lens reflex (TLR) box camera dating to the mid-1950s.
Like other TLR cameras, the Lubitel has one lens for framing a shot and another lens for actually taking the photo. It takes photographs on 120 format analog film. That makes for very large negatives.
Interestingly, it also means that the photos are square. It’s a bit like Instagram, only seventy years old!
The Lubitel, in particular, is a Soviet knockoff of more expensive German and American cameras. This is a cheap camera built for the Proletariat masses. It even proudly says “made in USSR” right on the lens! The main element is a 75mm F4.5 lens.
I loaded my camera, which I purchased online, with modern Ilford 120 format black-and-white film and then took a walk around Union Square taking photographs.
My first one captures the iconic pyramid-shaped Christmas tree in front of Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s Union Square.
This camera is a blunt instrument, and the ability to control exposure is not extremely accurate. That results in a really cool shot but with an almost totally washed-out sky, and the stark figure of the Christmas tree rendered as a geometric pyramid in the foreground.
A smaller tree closer to me adds a bit of visual drama to the shot.
Likewise, crowd shots are dramatically blurred.
I actually love this effect, though! It captures some of the frantic energy of Union Square and the crowds there around the holiday season, especially before the pandemic.
Other crowd photos capture a similar dynamic. I love that this one includes a person in the foreground holding a cellphone.
That really helps to establish that these are modern photos. The person is also looking up at a billboard that shows a modern iPhone.
It’s a cool merging of decades-old technology, the film camera, with modern technology seen in the shot. Most people would take the same picture on their iPhone!
One of my favorite shots from the day captures a family resting on a bench in front of the iconic Macy’s Union Square.
They look weary, and the entire family spills off the bench and fills the space around it.
It’s one of the crispest shots I captured during the day. The family is decently well-focused, and the background isn’t as blown out as in other shots.
One of the people in the family looks over his shoulder at me, probably wondering what I’m doing with an ancient-looking film camera around my neck.
I like the shot because it captures the exhaustion of a day in the bustling city of San Francisco. This family is seen in a quiet moment within the chaos of an ordinary day.
The analog film captures the timeless quality of the scene. The lack of detail focuses on the emotions and facial expressions of the subjects, rather than rendering the shot in crisp technical perfection.
It was a very cool experience using a 70+-year-old camera to photograph a modern city. You can easily grab vintage cameras like these online for a few dollars and try them out for your own analog film experiments.
