What's Better Than No Camera?

I’m following the instructions confidently until “ remember the desired aperture “...Photography remains a mystery to me.

For a long time, lenses on an SLR camera have been clever. They let you look through them at the setting which admits the most light, so that you get a decent view and can focus and recompose at will. Then, when you press the shutter, they will automatically close down the quantity of light to the setting necessary for the right exposure. However, the lens that came with this camera is not clever. It is a pre-set. Thus, you set your shutter speed and your aperture consistent with the reading you obtained for good exposure. Often that means the view is too dim to focus. So you twist the aperture to its greatest setting for light; you focus; then you twist it back to where it was before (that's why you must remember it). Then you make the picture. For years I thought this was far too complicated. But it isn't. It just slows you down a bit. For photographing a moving subject it's crap. For a thing which keeps still, it is not a problem. Unless your short-term memory is poor.

It's kind of fun taking pictures with the Zenit-E, though I never trust the built-in meter and usually carry an old light meter or else just take a guess. As for the aperture setting, on the Helios 44-2 you set the aperture ring, then twist it back to wide open to focus, and then twist the ring back to where you set it (it will stop turning at that point). So you don't really have to remember where you set it--you've pre-set it. For me, the annoying complication is having to load the film manually, an operation that can take me fifteen or twenty minutes before I get it right.