‘Trigger Point’ is one of this year’s most anticipated dramas on UK TV, a police procedural thriller following a bomb disposal squad in London.
The series is set in the present day, but the props department might have you believing it’s a good 30 years ago.
In one scene shown on Sunday (30 January) a police forensic photographer is seen taking photographs at a crime scene – using a Soviet-era Zenit-122 SLR and a rather chunky Vivitar-branded hot shoe flash.
Photographer David Collyer spotted it while watching the show on Sunday and sent Kosmo Foto a screengrab.
It may have once been the case that cash-strapped police forces in the UK might have had to buy Soviet gear for their forensic photography teams – a lot of it was imported into the UK via an official distributor – but Kosmo Foto would bet that 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it’s highly unlikely any police forces still have a Zenit in their crime-scene camera bags.
The Zenit-122 was a plastic-bodied descendant of the famous Zenit-E, first released in 1990, just before the end of the Soviet Union. It’s essentially an upgraded Zenit-12, with a light meter visible in the viewfinder. The Zenit-122 adds some slightly more updated styling – including a hand grip on the front of the camera – but would have been an unlikely forensic photography tool in the early 1990s, let alone 30 years later.
Prop departments usually go to great lengths to get period detail correct in historical dramas, especially with furnishings and items such as camera. So we can’t help thinking that this was a joke or a bet. Is someone on the production team a Soviet camera fan? Was it a last-day wind-up?
It may be worth tuning in next week, just in case the crime scene photographer is packing a Speed Graphic or a Box Brownie…
- Many thanks to David Collyer for his eagle-eyed camera spotting and the screen grab
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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have to admit I did spot the Zenit when trigger point was on; and did chuckle to myself….
It should be worth remembering that a film camera would be a better than a digital camera for documentary purposes (& many others) because you have a negative to compare it to & thus avoid possible allegations of manipulation of evidence.
Is that a Tair-3 lens from the Photosniper? how far was the crime scene?
I love how a TV crime scene ALWAYS amplifies the noise of any flash, whether it’s an old timey bulb, a flash cube or a speed light!
Ha. Dead right. It’s entered the lexicon of film making.