Photo card from Saint Petersburg

This roll turned out to be relatively great. I was kind of surprised by the number of interesting results. This Lucky shd400 film has high contrast, which I like a lot. But I was disappointed with a hair stuck on the camera lens. It was creeping into the cadre since the last film. I didn't think much of it. But here the hair became even more pronounced with all the black and white contrast. It would be hard to forgive myself if I didn't remove it before shooting the next film. So I took the freshly loaded film out of my Olympus Pen EE-2 to somehow clean the lens.

First, I tried blowing air through the shutter from inside of the camera. But it was open for such a short time, maybe 1/40 of a second. So I didn't achieve any effect. And the hair seemed to be stuck on the lens. I decided not to even try to lock the shutter, because it must be so fragile. It must be really thin, and any manipulation there could lead to catastrophe. So the only option was to put off the lens.

I studied a few videos available on youtube where people were disassembling similar cameras. It seemed like I needed to unscrew the outermost inner ring with the inscription to gain access to the screws. Then unscrew them and the lens should come off. But it was not obvious how to do that, cause they used some special tools.

I made some kind of mark on the side ring, which may not have been necessary, but I made it anyway so that it would line up with the line of square holes on the inner ring. I also remembered the ISO mark I chose.

The task was not easy, since the inscription ring was stuck. So I first tried to unscrew the ring by applying pressure to these 2 small square holes in the corners of the inner ring. But that was a bad idea since I scratched some black paint around it. Moreover, it was completely unnecessary, because this inner ring is independent of the inscription ring, which is the outer one. So the outer one locks the inner one anyway.

After a while I found a mop handle that matched the diameter of the ring. I put a masking tape on the ring so that both sides were sticky. And I tried to carefully unscrew the ring by applying the mop handle to it like the base of a cylinder. Somehow I succeeded. Underneath the ring there were 3 screws. I unscrewed them and the lens came off. And there was the devil's hair.

I removed the hair by the blower. It is very important to blow any objects out of lens first before brushing it, to not scratch the surface of the lens. So I kept hoping that I hadn't damaged the lens in any way. I then carefully breathed on the lens and wiped it with microfiber. I think the saliva might be dangerous to the optics though, so the idea was to only apply distilled water from the condensed breath. If I had an isopropyl alcohol or some special cleaning mixture I would probably use it. But I had none. I was offered a 70% distilled ethanol alcohol. I guess my lens had no coating, but it still was not a good idea either, since it was not guaranteed to be clean from other chemicals.

I cleaned everything I could gain access to and assembled everything back hoping that I did not change any order of things. I'm still not sure what will happen with the next roll. Hopefully everything will be fine. We will see. Now let's check out some pictures from the Lucky shd400 high contrast film.