Took Amy to the west wetlands and the gateway park for some photos. Unfortunately the new camera and I did not communicate with each other well. The last shot was the only one I was close to happy with (and even then I’m not big on the composition and it’s not what I thought it was.)
Oh well, at least distant friends and family can get an idea of what Amy looks like right now. Full album here.
Ok, I know I’ve promised a couple of people a weekend update. It’s going to be a bit longer…it’s really not worth the wait…but I don’t have ANY photos to go with it. And since the whole point of the weekend was photography that just doesn’t seem right. The chemicals are cooling right now so I can process the film I shot and Amy will hopefully give me her memory card tonight. So this is just a place holder post.
The reason for the placeholder? I added a new skill to my resume just now. Camera repair! I recently bought a Bronica ETRS off ebay for $45. The camera is gorgeous, looks like it’s been in it’s original box it’s whole life. But – something was wrong. I could remove the film back with the darkslide out…and the shutter wouldn’t release. Not wanting to make it any worse but now having everything except a body I placed another order, this time to KEH, for a new body…and while I was at it a $10 “ugly” finder, a $10 “ugly” speed grip and a $30 “Bargain” 150mm lens to go with the $50 “Bargain” body.
The new body from KEH works great. I found that my $10 ebay special film back sometimes skips frames…but for $10…what are ya going to do. I’ll just keep my eyes open for a deal on a back in better condition…I want 2-3 more anyway.
So tonight with the original and much nicer looking but locked up body sitting on my desk teasing me I figured “What the heck”. It’s broken already…let’s see what’s wrong. Working the winder and various levers and catchs I thought I had a pretty good idea what may be wrong with it. There was one lever that appeared to be behind something it should have been in front of….it was part of the lens release mechanism but seemed to be connected to the film back detection levers. So I took that side off first. Examining the workings I pretty much determined that yes – that piece was what was causing the problem.
But couldn’t get it back into it’s proper position without releasing the shutter…which I still couldn’t do from this side. So I screwed it back together and took the other side off instead.
Figured out the other shutter interlocks on that side…but still couldn’t release the shutter. Decided to put two and two together at that point. Took the other side back apart again so both sides were now bare…and manually triggered the safety while pressing the shutter…ca-chunk. It worked, the shutter released! Recocked the shutter…and pressed the shutter without manually overriding anything…ca-chunk – it worked again!
Put the sides back and and dry fired it a few more times…it works great! What’s more is I think I know how it happened. I think that if you cock the shutter while holding the lens release back this could happen. I didn’t test it while I had the sides off…but I’m going to avoid doing that just to be safe 😀
So here’s the guts of my now repaired camera:
What was wrong
That was where I found the problem. The little round thing with the spring around it is part of the lens release. There’s a little lever that’s supposed to be captured by the groove on that deal. It was behind it instead. This is after I fixed it so you can’t really see the lever that was misplaced.
Access to the problem area
This was the sideview of the problem area. The lever that was misplaced is attached to the brass bar near the bottom. The entire thing was supposed to be pushed more forward. Pushing the grey bit on the right towards the lens tricked the camera into thinking the film back was properly seated and the darkslide was removed. That should be the default position…but the lever was stuck against the round thing which kept it from returning to the default position. Pushing the grey bit forward was the key to releasing the shutter and allowing things to reset properly!
The winding mechanism
And this is the other side, the infamous winding mechanism which is apparently one of the first things to go on these cameras. Figuring out how the shutter release worked from here helped me figure out how to solve the problem. But I now know the problem could have been solved entirely from the other side. Still neat that I got to see this.
So – I now have two working ETRS bodies. I’ll probably keep this one and re-sell the KEH one…or I may keep it as a spare. We’ll have to see what happens!
It’s been a weekend that could have easily supported a blog post a day. But I’m lazy and I really was hoping to get a new photo or two printed before posting…but other things happened and I still haven’t made any new prints. So here’s the updates instead!
This one will be long with a lot of photos…no teaser photo for the front though.
Still no safelight so I get frustrated quickly when printing, but that should be rectified soon. Even so I scraped an hour or so out of my schedule to try and crank out another print or two last night. Results were not quite what I had hoped for:
Better exposure, but neg was damaged.
Well, with the darkroom functional for printing – though annoying to use without a safelight – this weekend Amy and I decided to work on the other half of the image and expose some film.
Laguna Dam - abandoned sluiceway
Read on for details!
Well the blog started with my first darkroom, this isn’t a sign that the blog is ending…but I now have a darkroom again! Well, kind of. A new camera store opened up in town and we stopped in on Saturday to check it out. Turns out they have darkroom supplies, so I couldn’t resist. We picked up some paper and chemicals and decided it would give us incentive to get a darkroom up and going! Read on for details about how we’ve pulled it off…kind of…. Continue reading →
(NOTE: I got lightbox working. Click on one of the photos in this post to check it out.)
One of the interesting aspects of digital photography for me is the way that suddenly the camera make a much bigger difference in the photo than it did previously. This is of course because the camera now also does the job of the film. With film cameras it was relatively simple to swap rolls of film to get increased speed ratings or different color balances and response curves giving wildly different results for the same “photo”. Yes, much of that can be mimicked through processing and at the hands of a skilled artist can be quite convincing. But there are still physical limits that could be changed or pushed with film that are fixed and solid with digital. This was even worse when all cameras created JPG’s or TIF’s so you were stuck with the artifacts of each cameras own software shortcomings.
Thankfully RAW files bring back a lot of the flexibility of film that was missing. And in many ways give even more flexibility since now you can choose your “film” after you shoot instead of before, not to mention being able to change your mind on the fly.
Which tasty Challa would you rather have:
Read on for the differences
Continue reading →