A rainbow over liverpool catholic cathedral

Abandoned Railway tracks, at wallasey docks

The Kiev 88 is a Ukrainian Medium format SLR, It’s development started with the Salyut which went into mass production in 1957 at the Arsenal factory in Kiev. It has interchangeable Viewfinders, including a top down viewfinder, and metered and unmetered pentaprism viewfinders (the viewfinder shown is the TTL spot meter pentaprism), and interchangeable backs, allowing you to swap film halfway through a roll, using either 120 roll film, with 6×6 or 6×4.5 size exposures, or polaroid instant film.

The example in the picture is an upgraded version of the Arsenal factory model, produced by Arax who are also based in the Ukraine.

The FED-5 is a 35mm rangefinder camera, produced at the Kharkov working commune in what is now the Ukraine.

It has an M39x1 leica thread mount, attached to which is perhaps the most interesting thing about the camera, its Industar-61L/D lens this is the standard lens for the FED-5. What is so unusual about the lens is that it’s radioactive, due to the glass contained in its 4 element Zeiss Tessar based design containing Lanthane.

Lanthane is a rare earth element, with a half life of in excess of 100 billion years, despite the lens emitting radiation, it is not dangerous as the levels are so low, even touching the lens you will absorb less than half the amount of radiation that you absorb from natural levels of background radiation.