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There should just be a Zenit starter pack post made at this point, geez.
1)Your Zenits' viewfinders are bare ground glass with no focusing aid. Enjoy missing focus.
2)The viewfinder shows about 66% of the actual photo you'll take - frame with that in mind or your subjects will be surrounded by lots of dead space.
3)The built-in lightmeters are a strip of selenium behind a plastic grid - the worst kind possible. The Leningrad8 handheld meter is literally a bare selenium sensor that slides further or closer from the hole in the front of the meter, again, bottom of the barrel stuff. Find a uniformly lit bright wall and see which of the three meters (2 Zenit ones, the Leningrad) gives you the highest readout and use that for your first roll. Thankfully as they deteriorate they tell you to overexpose so it shouldnt be awful. You should be getting around f8 1/125 pointing at thr ground/darker objects during partially cloudy daytime at iso 100, ish, assuming northern hemisphere. If the readouts are anywhere near that, you can "trust" the lightmeter.
4)both helioses and mir have a pre-set aperture - two rings, one clicks to the aperture you want, the other ring moves smoothly between wide open and that value you selected - so you focus wide open (brighter image, more accurate focusing) and stop down before shooting. The industar pancake is cool af but you need to change the aperture manually every time. All lenses have depth of field scales on'em, so you can also zone focus,( at least with the wider mir.)
Check the shutter curtains for pinholes by opening the back, unscrewing the lens and looking at it both prior and after cocking the shutter aga7nst a bright light.
