Tony Kemplen on the…
This 35mm stereo camera made in Ukraine is a stereo version of the FED 50
This oddly named and strange looking camera was made in Ukraine in the 1990s. The factory in Kharkiv where it comes from dates back to Soviet times, when its output was marked as made in the USSR. The FED BOY was first made in 1988, but mine was clearly made later as it is marked made in Ukraine, indicating that it was produced after the break up of the Soviet Union.
FED cameras, which are somewhat ominously named after KGB chief Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, were in production for six decades. While the earliest FEDs were more or less straight copies of the Leica II, by the end of their run, the FEDs had acquired their own distinctive look. This particular example is a stereo version of the FED 50, which unlike earlier FEDs has an electronic exposure system. This automatically selects a shutter speed of between 1/30sec and 1/650sec and also sets the aperture. Manual override is possible, in which case the aperture can be chosen, but the shutter speed is fixed at 1/30sec which is suitable for flash.
Most 35mm stereo cameras produce negatives measuring 24x23mm, the so-called 5P format, named because each frame takes up five perforations. The FED uses seven perforations with each image being 24x32mm, almost the same size as a standard full-frame negative. The stereo effect works best when there are details both closer and further away than the main subject, so the illusion of depth can be fully appreciated. A rule of thumb states that the sweet spot for the main subject is 30 times the distance between the two taking lenses, so in the case of the FED BOY whose lenses are 64mm apart, that distance will be just shy of 2m. One subject which certainly doesn’t play well with stereo photography is landscape, in which there is no di
