P.S. Do you know the photographs of Vittorio Sella in Georgian Caucasus?
No, I didn't know. Googled them... very interesting, but not special
for me. What fascinates me in certain mountain images is the combination of a long lens, some mist, and composition that almost makes background look like it's closer than foreground... up to the point you start thinking they are shot with different lenses. All this gives the image some surreal look, and yours have it in spades for me.
P.S. Zorki5? My wife bought a Fed (if I remember well the name) in URSS many years ago, and never used it
It's usually spelled FED, as it's acronym for Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of "ЧК" (che-kha), that later became NKVD, then KGB, and now FSB...
I still have FED-5, as well as Zorki-5 (my favorite, built with high precision, a Soviet Leica, so to say), Kiev-30 (James Bond spy-type camera
), and Vilia, all from Soviet times.
I found it recently, but, fiddling with it, I made the (maybe) fatal mistake: I changed the shutter speed with uncocked shutter. Anyway, I've never taken photos with it.
FEDs indeed have issue with that, but changing shutter speed with uncocked shutter should not be fatal. Yes, the mark only points to the correct shutter speed when the shutter is cocked, but you can change it anyway, and not break it -- unless you, say, have it set at max speed already, and try to turn it further, applying excessive force (which, yeah, can happen if you're doing it when the shutter is uncocked, so you do not actually see the current speed).