I've recently discovered the usefulness of "vintage" lenses on modern, mirrorless cameras. These flower photos were taken with a 57-year-old Super-Takumar 1:4 / 50mm, adapted to my trusty Olympus OM-1 (OMD Systems, 2022) camera. This lens falls within the range of the radioactive Super-Takumars, so maybe that helped with the red/amber colors.

This is what happens when you take a 45-year-old lens made in the USSR, put it on a 5-year-old digital camera made in Vietnam, and hope that everything is blurry in the right places.

The lens is from a Zenit-E camera manufactured by Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works in 1977. KMW was located near Moscow, which was the host-city of the 1980 Summer Olympics. My copy of the Zenit-E was made specifically for the 1980 Summer Olympics and bears the logo of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games on its body. At that time, the USSR was second, only to Japan, in the manufacture of SLR cameras. I obtained my Zenit-E Olympic Model specifically because of its connection to the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, an Olympics in which the US and 65 other countries did not participate. Why?

The 66 countries boycotted the 1980 Olympics in response to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, a war that was so costly to the USSR, that it has been cited by scholars as a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The more things change, the more they stay the same…