A little bypass to my Cmena8 still camera

A closer look on my Cmena8

For me photography is a rather difficult thing to do. I am not much of a composer. Of course when I found my godfather's old Cmena 8 camera I took some pictures with it. I was not very satisfied with the result that time (back in 1998). So I borrowed a Zenit and Praktica type camera which were both mirror reflex cameras. 

As I grew older I became more attracted to analog film and I also had to give the lended cameras back to their owners. Later on Lomography became a trend so I started to use the simple and let's say not that high quality Cmena to shoot some pictures with again. Bad quality sort of became a trend that I liked.

I took the Cmena to family trips, once even to Prague. With the many years between using my Cmena I always had to re-learn the basics of film photography. I told you I am totally amateur.

Now I decided to post to the few people who would have trouble using the Cmena, a little tutorial about how I use it. My ideas might be wrong so any comment is appreciated. 

If I use the Cmena without a  light meter I do the following. First I need to guess the quantity of light according to my film's speed. As far as I know the performance of the lens is best at aperture set between 5.6 and 8. I try to keep to it.

After I have guessed the amount of light I measure the distance towards my object too. In this example that would be 5.6 meters. I set the distance on the distance ring. Now you can either guess the shutter speed than set aperture or vice versa. Let's assume we would need aperture 4. On the front ring (see the picture) you can see a red and a white dot. This helps you to find out the connected shutter speed to each aperture. This does not make much sense to me though. It seems that if you set a smaller number of aperture then Cmena suggests you to use a long exposure time because "it thinks" that you are in low light conditions. 

Namely aperture 4 always connects to 1/15 shutter speed according to the red and white dots on the front ring. It is pretty long to hold it steady. Anyway I usually corrected the suggestion to a shutter speed that I thought would do a fairly okay image. You can see on the next pic that the white dot in the front refers to the shutter speeds. 

Next Cmena tells you the depth of field's minimums and maximums. The third pics shows you how to read it when the aperture is set to 4. Important that the sharpest object on the image will be the one exactly located on the distance set. With this tool you can have smaller depth of field pics (i think portraits) or you can have longer ones (landscapes). 

Finally let me show you some pictures I took with the Cmena. Since it is a totally manual camera it is able to do double exposure which can be a fun game to play with. 

Basically this is the way I use my Cmena 8.