Anyone who has trawled through a historic photo archive knows the feeling of spotting a large-format photo. Like spotting a beautiful woman in a crowd, it’s hard to drag your eyes away. That depth and clarity, which seems to top reality itself, has only ever been possible with a film plane measured in inches rather than millimeters.
Two photographers risked freezing cold waters to explore a former Soviet labor camp in Estonia that's now partially submerged in a lake.
An unusual and rare vintage Russian spy camera has appeared for sale. The 35mm rangefinder film camera was designed to photograph through tiny holes drilled in walls and capture photos for blackmail or target manipulation.
Beneath the streets of Tbilisi lies a network of tunnels, bomb shelters, and Soviet-era chambers that many locals know nothing about. Over the past several months, photographer David Tabagari has been exploring this silent underworld with extraordinary results.
A photographer has traveled across the world -- mainly ex-Yugoslavia, ex-Soviet, and East European countries -- and turned largely abandoned and often neglected monuments into spectacular pieces of futuristic art filled with light and color.
The Zenit-M camera first announced over a year ago is finally available to purchase in the US. The full-frame M-Mount rangefinder, which was created in collaboration with Leica, is very similar to the Leica M (Typ 240)... and it has a price to match.
80 photographs shot by Masha Ivashintsova that are on display from December 4 in Tallinn, Estonia. The retrospective is the first of its kind since Asya Ivashintsova-Melkumyan stumbled on 30,000 forgotten photographs taken by her mother that capture a poetic outsider's view of life in the Soviet Union.
U.S.-trained Afghans photographed the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. These rare color photos bring the U.S.S.R.'s "hidden war" to light.
Want to hear a communist joke? Well, they are only really funny if everyone gets them, but if you still want to hear it, then Soviet: A worker standing in a liquor line says: “I have had enough, save my place, I am going to shoot Gorbachev.” Two hours later he returns to claim his place in line. His friends ask, “Did you get him?” “No, the line there was even longer than the line here.”
If you're a fan of old and unusual cameras, the new KGB Spy Museum in New York City is something you may want to put on your list of museums to visit. Located in Manhattan, the space features a huge collection of spy cameras created during the Soviet era among 3,500 exhibits.
Photoshop 1.0 was first released as the Soviet Union was collapsing, but long before the software made photo manipulation easy, Kremlin censors went to extraordinary lengths to touch up history.
The Soviet Utopia: sending your hard-working state citizens on a health holiday to one of the empire's many sanatoria. Originally conceived in the 1920s, these USSR sanatoria offered a combination of health and medical benefits alongside thermal baths and spas. These institutions were once among the most innovative buildings of that era.
If you have deep pockets and a deep love for rare cameras, check out this... ring. It's a gold ring that's actually an extremely rare Soviet-era spy camera used by the KGB.
As Central Asia was transformed under Soviet rule, one man made a remarkable record of life in the fledgling Uzbek S.S.R. before being driven from his career and toward tragedy.
This is really cool. It turns out you can browse through full issues of the old Soviet Photo (AKA "Советское фото") magazine online at Archive.org. Fans of photography history will love this treasure trove, which contains 437 digitized issues originally published between 1926 and 1991.
There are some fantastic portrait lenses out there for cheap, if you know where to look. A great example is the Jupiter-9: a 50-year-old M42 mount 85mm f/2 Soviet lens that, in the right hands, captures beautiful portraits with gorgeous bokeh.
Photographer Manuel Ortiz went out and did something many of us have been considering a lot lately: he bought himself a cheap, vintage Soviet lens. And now, we get to join him to see how this awesome old portrait lens performs when it's attached to the very modern Sony A7R II.
Several years ago, I bought an old Soviet camera that I found in a London flea market. It cost me £4, so every time I put a roll of film in the camera, it multiplies its cost.
A backpack filled with extremely rare and valuable Soviet camera prototypes was recently stolen at the Berlin Central Station in Germany.
If your mantra in life is "bigger is better," then here's a lens for you. Over in Ukraine, someone is selling a gigantic lens from a Soviet spy satellite on the country's "craigslist".
The Jupiter 21M is the real deal... assuming you have the biceps to wield it. A 200mm f/4 lens from the Soviet era, it captures exquisite details and will only set you back between $30 and $100 on eBay.
Ever wanted to strap a portable telescope to the end of your camera and carry it around? With the soviet-made MTO 1000A 1,100mm f/10.5 mirror lens, you can just about do it. A monster of a lens, Christopher Frost Photography put it through its paces for one of his Weird Lens Reviews.
If you enjoy do-it-yourself photography hacks and projects, here's an interesting one for you to try: buy an old Soviet MIR-1B camera lens for about $45 on eBay, open it up by unscrewing the front, and reverse the front lens element. The result is a "reverse globular lens," photographer Mathieu Stern says.
Leica, watch your back: you have a competitor in the horizon. The iconic Zenit Soviet camera brand is coming back... as a luxury camera brand.
Lomography just brought another classic lens design back from the dead. Today the company announced its new Jupiter 3+ 50mm f/1.5 lens for L39 and M mount rangefinders.
It's "a bold, beautiful, and brimming-with-bokeh resurrection from the zenith of Russian optical design," Lomo says.
Russian urban exploration photographer Ralph Mirebs recently paid a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where inside a giant abandoned hangar are decaying remnants of prototypes from the Soviet space shuttle program.
Next time a spouse or friend razzes you for spending too much on camera gear, try pointing out all the cool, expensive stuff you didn't buy. Like the antique, no-name, large-format lens currently up for sale on eBay for close to half a million bucks.
It turns out that the sharing of images taken by orbiters and rovers in space may have more of a purpose than just being cool to look at. According to a NASA press release published last Thursday, a group of amateur Russian space enthusiasts may have found a missing soviet Mars lander using nothing more than images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Three years before Photoshop 1.0 was released, computer engineers in the USSR were already retouching photographs using some surprisingly …