craniac’s place

I am fascinated by old cameras but don’t have the money to be a collector, as such. No fancy old Leica’s for me, but occasionally I manage to look in the right place to find something interesting, if not valuable. On Saturday I popped into Cash Crusaders to see if they had an interesting old cameras there. They had two SLRs, a Pracktica and a Zenit, but the Praktica was in much worse shape than the one I already have and was also rather pricey. The Zenit was quite cheap but also looked pretty battered. What really caught my eye was this Martex rangefinder. I’ve long had a hankering for a rangefinder and at only R145 there was no way it wasn’t coming home with me, even if I found it didn’t work. It was Sunday before I got round to buying a roll of film to try it out. After cleaning the camera, loading the film and figuring out what appeared to be the right way to use the light meter, which seemed to be working, I headed off down to the beach, my favourite haunt. It was near sunset when I got there and being winter there weren’t too many people about. I strolled around and shot off my roll of film before heading home again. As I was very keen to get it developed and see the results I popped the film into the Kodak minilab in the mall next door to our offices, rather than making the trip into town to the more professional (so I’ve been told) lab I would normally use. I picked up the prints at lunch time and was pleased to find that the camera works perfectly. The photographs were pretty much (it will take a little practice to get spot on) correctly exposed and accurately focused. I was worried about the focus as I’d never used a rangefinder before. The only disappointment was that I was offered, and accepted digital copies of the photos on a CD, and the quality of these was terrible. they were horribly grainy and as the prints themselves were fine I can only assume that the scanning process was not all it could be. In the end I made my own scans of the better shots from the prints. Here is a selection of the photos I took, not too bad for a forty or fifty year old camera. These photographs have not been digitally enhanced in any way.

As I’ve mentioned my faithful old 300D is broken.

Today Mela and I went off to Orms and she bought me a 30D as an early birthday gift (my birthday is on 19 May). I haven’t really used it yet because we were out most of the day but the few shots I took amazed me with the sheer speed of the 30D, compared to the 300D.

On Friday I blogged about the autofocus on my camera packing up. I fixed it last night and the autofocus now works perfectly again. Unfortunately there is another problem now; the LCD display on the back and in the viewfinder is not working. Everything else is functional but I can no longer see what settings I am using and don’t have any visible light meter. This may be due to the latch of the ribbon cable connector on the back breaking when I opened it, or it could be something else. Luckily I work with a bunch of electronic engineers so I’ll ask one of them to take a look at it. I’ll also keep hoping that somebody gives me a new camera body for my birthday, which is only three weeks off.

Well my camera is anyway. I was fiddling with it last night and discovered that it will no longer autofocus. The cause is a pin that raises and lowers the sub-mirror assembly that casts light on the autofocus sensors having broken. For some reason Canon made this small pin from plastic and its failure is a common fault on the Digital Rebel range. Fortunately it seems quite an easy repair to do. I have found a nicely documented series of photographs that lead you through the procedure. It will simply take time and patience for me to repair it myself.