Pass the RF - part 3 - UPDATE

Update time again! I've been out-of-office for a while and in the meantime a few things happened to the travelling FED-2! Ready? Here it goes, quoted straight from Philipp's entry in the travelling Fed's thread on the rangefinderforum....

I've got some BAD NEWS for this project. While shopping (and photographing) on Chorsu bazaar here in Tashkent I had my bag stolen with the FED in it (and some other mildly important stuff, but that doesn't matter in this context). So the camera and the roll of film I had in there are now in the hands of an unknown guy somewhere in Uzbekistan (who's probably bothered and had hoped for more). This irks me a lot.

Now in order to get this thing going again, we need to get a new camera in circulation, and I think it's my responsibility to do so. Basically I have three options:

Option A is that Tashkent has a huge Sunday flea market where people sell all sorts of Soviet stuff. There is usually a guy or two selling cameras, I bought my Kiev 88 there from an Armenian guy for a very reasonable price. I can go there on Sunday and try to get a replacement FSU rangefinder, but I can't guarantee it's going to be a FED-2. (Incidentally, the FED-2 is a great camera.)

Option B is that the next guy on the list is Ondrej in Bratislava. In Slovakia it should be possible to get an FSU camera relatively easy, so we could skip the shipping from here and just continue with the next guy on the list. Maybe Ondrej could look for a replacement camera and I can try to wire him the money via Western Union or PayPal. (I can't do international money orders from here, unfortunately.)

Option C is that I ask my beautiful wife at home in Berlin to send my own Canonet GIII QL17 to Ondrej. Not an FSU camera, though. I would have her send my Zorki-6, but that one eats film.

Since I wanted to go to the flea market anyway, if we don't reach a consensus until Sunday I think I'll just go for option A, and if there is no suitable camera we can still think about something else. Let me hear what you think!

Philipp (This Pass-the-RF turns into a real adventure...)

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