Well, I got the negs back today from the first film though my Smena Symbol for about 25 years.
It is one of the cameras I got from my wife’s uncle during our visit to Poland last month. It’d been in their family from new (1989) but only used for 5 years.
The reason that the camera hadn’t been used for so long is because the wind-on mechanism had jammed. I had it apart and freed it up and it seems from the results that it is winding on ALMOST perfectly. But I love the fact that occasionally it has joined two frames together. The is particularly effective when it is the war grave of a Russian soldier joined to a Catholic road-side shrine.
Two ideologies that don’t get on well, but looking good side by side on a roll of Fuji Superia.
The camera has been really simple to get on with. It raised a few alarm bells when my hand luggage was x-rayed on the way out of Poland. I guess they saw a large lump of metal and plastic with gears, pulleys and springs – not how cameras looks these days even in x-ray.
It feels really robust and I’ve quite happily chucked it into my bag to carry on my daily cycle commute. It is made of plastic and metal, but it seems that the bit you’d think might be metal are plastic and vice versus.
I tried to use the aperture and shutter settings rather than just relying on the picturegrams of different shades of clouds, and for the most part, it worked really well. The Fuji 400 allowed me to use the camera pretty much everywhere and catch action too.
It is a camera that I’m going to keep close by being reliable and quick and easy to use yet well built enough to survive my adventures.
You can find the rest of the album here: http://www.lomography.com/homes/placidcasua1/albums/1745184-smena-symbol-first-roll-for-25-years
They’re scanned on a cheap Aldi scanner but still look pretty good. I’ll re-scan when my Epson arrives next week.
Sorry the formatting is all over the place, I’ve copied this post from my LomoHome.
Barnaby Nutt 
Exciting times ahead! Ed Hamrick's Vuescan works much, much better than Epson's own software for scanning film. You can do multipass scans, apply specific film profiles and control the scanner much more precisely.
http://www.hamrick.com/
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