Happy New Year!

Actually, I have to admit that this picture has nothing to do with New Year and I didn’t even take this photo. I was scanning my parents’ slide collection and found it there. In the end of 1970’s my father and his friends went on a ski trip to Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia for several times (because traveling outside Soviet Union was severely restricted). On one of those trips one of my father’s friends had a magnesium torch with him and on the spur of the moment they burned it just for fun and that’s what this somewhat legendary photo is about. Now, at that time, pyrotechnics like these weren’t available in stores just so, it was normally acquired through the friend of a friend of a friend.

Smena 6 was very good camera for ski trips like that, because it was light weight and had a simple construction. It worked flawlessly even with -30 degrees Celsius, while Zenit’s and Fed’s, that were other popular cameras at the time, lubrication became thick with cold like that.

Photo is taken with Smena 6.