These beautiful panoramas by Olaf Matthes were taken in 2003 with an old Soviet camera designed in the 1950s.

If you move along to Olaf’s gallery you can see many more in glorious superwide Sovietvision.The camera used here is the FT-2 panoramic camera, named after its inventor Feodor Tokarev.

Tokarev was, amongst other things, an arms inventor and a ‘Personal Friend of Stalin‘. But despite his friend in high places, Feodor’s design took eight years to go into production.

The FT-2 was built by Krasnogorsky Mekhanichesky Zavod - the famous producer of the Zenit and Zorki cameras. It featured an innovative ’swing lens’ design which minimised the distortion associated with wide-angle lenses.

You could almost call the FT-2 an automatic, since there’s hardly anything you can set yourself. It has a fixed focus, fixed focal length, a fixed aperture and shutter bugs must make do with just three speeds. (See the brass plaque on top of the camera on the left.) I discovered from Marco’s enthusiasts page that its best shot is landscapes with sharpness of 20 metres to infinity. That’s because it was originally designed to verify the impact of an artillery barrage.

Later though it was marketed worldwide under names such as ‘The Spaceview’ - all very redolent of Sixties, State of The Soviet technology.Collectors and Sovietica buffs can still find examples of the camera for sale. Count around 250 USD. One snag: you’ll have to make its rather idiosyncratic 35mm cassettes by hand yourself.

If anyone’s up for it though, the manual is here.