Minolta IV-F

Some months back, when I wrote my review on the Minolta IV-F light meter, I loved it so much, I went searching for another.

I think the IV-F is one of the best light meters I have ever used, but I really don’t need two. If you are looking for an easy-to-use, dependable and accurate light meter, I am selling this one. It is in nice cosmetic condition and comes with lanyard and case.

Price is $100 plus $10 for USPS Priority shipping.

Top Notch Gear for Sale

Regretfully, I need to sell a couple of my nicer classic cameras. Both of these cameras have had recent service and both are in near mint condition. While these prices may seem high, you are getting a camera that has been serviced, tested and will be packed with care. My asking price is right around what I have invested in each.

Canon F-1n w/ 50mm f/1.4 Canon FD

This is cosmetically one of the nicest SLRs I have ever owned. No marks other than a some scratches on the baseplate. I had Garry Airapetov do a CLA last year and have only shot one roll of film in it since then with every frame perfectly exposed. I use a silver oxide 386 battery in this camera with a MR-9 adapter (not included). The 50mm Canon lens is equally as nice, clean, clear, no haze or fungus. It has a Canon OEM protective skylight filter on it. I needed a +0.5 diopter on the viewfinder for my eyesight and I searched high and low for one. I paid $50 for it. I am going to leave it on the camera in case you need it. If not, sell it. They are rare. SOLD

Pentax Spotmatic SP Black Body-Modified w/ 50mm f/1.4

I wrote about this camera a few posts back and all of the work I had done on it. Black body Spotmatics are rare. Ones this nice are even rarer. Hardly any marks on this body. I had Eric Hendrickson CLA this for me and while he was at it, he installed a split-image focus screen from a Pentax K1000 SE making this Spottie simply a joy to use. None of the earlier Spotmatics had split image focusing, so this modified body is one-of-a-kind. Meter is spot on. Shutter is strong. The legendary 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar is equally as nice, silky smooth focus, no haze, no fungus, no scratches. I’ll include the OEM lens hood as well. I will shed a tear or two when I box this one up. SOLD

If you have purchased cameras from me here or on my eBay store, you know the quality of my gear.

Sekonic L-158 Auto Lumi: Another Neat Little Light Meter

Even though almost all of my film cameras have built-in light meters, I am still a sucker for acquiring and testing hand-held meters. Most of them are relatively inexpensive. I paid $15 for this 1960s vintage Sekonic L-158 Auto Lumi and honestly, it’s a nice meter!

The Sekonic L-158 Auto Lumi

The L-158 is a simple reflected type meter using a selenium cell which also powers the meter. No battery needed. It’s small, lightweight and super easy to use:

  1. Set your ASA

  2. Point the meter at your subject

  3. Turn the dial until the red and green pointers line up

  4. See your various combinations of shutter speed and f/stop

Selenium cells do degrade with age but if the meter was stored in the dark for most of its life, many of these old meters are still accurate. This one agrees with the light meter app on my iPhone. I think it spent most of the last six decades sleeping in its carrying case.

Because it’s small and very light, I could easily carry it in my pocket or on a lanyard around my neck. I was inspired to try this meter after several Vietnam-era Nikon F photographers mentioned it as their meter of choice. Obviously, small meters that are not battery dependent would have been the order of the day for war photographers.

A Tale of Regret & Renewal: The Pentax Spotmatic

I’ve been spending some time lately organizing and cleaning up my archive of analog photographs. In the process, I realized that many of the ones I consider technically pretty good as well as personally satisfying, were made with two camera kits; a Leica M6TTL and 35mm f/2 Summicron and a Pentax Spotmatic and 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar. Here are two examples, both shot on Kodak film.

Fort Point, CA—Leica M6TTL, 35 Summicron, Kodak T Max 400

Pierce Point Ranch. Pt. Reyes National Seashore, CA — Pentax Spotmatic, 50/1.4 Super-Tak, Kodak T Max 100

I sold my Leica several years ago and the cost of acquiring another one today as well as the Summicron lens is financially out of the question. My Leica days are over unless I win the lottery. I sold my Spotmatic some time back as well. The one I had was a black body version that I had CLA’d and modified with a split image focus screen. A reader of this blog wrote and made me an offer that I could not refuse, so away went the Spottie. After receiving the Spotmatic, the buyer wrote me a nice note and said he thought I might regret selling the modified Pentax. He was right…I did and have missed having a camera body that takes M42 lenses, especially since I still have several nice Takumar primes.

To satisfy my Pentax screw mount yearning, I briefly considered buying a Voightlander Bessaflex TM, a M42 mount SLR made by Cosina from 2003 to 2007. Most of the ones I saw online were for sale in Japan and priced more than I wanted to spend or there were import duties that had to be paid. The other option was to begin looking for another Spotmatic. My favorite of all of the Spotmatics is the SP which does not have a built in hotshoe. I also wanted a black body, like the one I had sold. I casually browsed eBay for several weeks and saw lots of chrome bodies and the occasional black body. Nothing caught my eye. Then, one morning, I saw a black Spotmatic for sale on Facebook marketplace. It looked very nice, the listing said that the camera had been recently serviced by Eric Hendrickson and best of all, the owner was local! We messaged back and forth and made a deal.

When the camera arrived, it was better than advertised. All of the previous owners had taken good care of it and I know that Eric Hendrickson is the master of Spotmatic technicians, so it was functioning as designed. The only problem was that the camera had, as most Spotmatics do, a plain micro prism focusing screen. With my aging eyes, I really need split image focusing. This is where it gets interesting.

If you want split image focusing in a Spotmatic, you either have to find that rare Spotmatic F that came from the factory with a special order split image screen or have the camera modified. Spotmatic focusing screens are not changeable by the owner. It requires taking the camera apart and must be done by someone who knows what they are doing. Eric Hendrickson did my last modification. I wrote him to see if he had a split image screen in his shop and could he modify my latest Spotmatic and give it a once over. He wrote back that he’d be happy to check the camera out but he had no focusing screens in stock. Darn!

Undeterred, I asked Eric if I could source a split image screen somewhere. He replied that I needed to find a Spotmatic F, a Pentax ES or a K1000 SE that had a split image screen to use as a donor camera. Easier said than done. It’s almost impossible to find a SPF or ES with the split screen. And only certain K1000s had them installed. Eric also told me I had to look for a K1000 with the serial number on the top plate, so that helped me narrow down my search. And the most difficult part is that very few eBay sellers take a picture through the viewfinder of the camera so you can see what kind of screen is installed. But…I love a challenge. So I looked. And I looked. And I sent messages asking sellers about the their focusing screens.

Finally, I found a K1000 SE on eBay with the serial number on the top plate…

Pentax K1000 SE donor camera

I messaged the seller and asked if I could get a picture taken through the viewfinder so I could see what kind of focus screen it had and….happy day!

K1000 SE split image screen

When the donor camera arrived, I repackaged it and sent it to Eric. He did his magic with the focus screen and went through the camera to make sure make sure everything was ship shape. The process of finding a donor camera took two months. Eric had my camera back to me in less than a week.

Pentax Spotmatic SP with 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar

I also added one more item to the camera to make focusing even easer. In my parts junk box, I remembered I had a +1.00 diopter for Spotmatic. It fits over the viewfinder eyepiece.

Pentax Spotmatic +1.00 Diopter

I hope to get out over the Christmas holiday and take my Spotmatic for a test drive.

And just for the record, I intend to be buried with this camera and my Nikon F2A. Happy Holidays!

Eric Hendrickson is the master of repairing all things Pentax. You can find him here.

Photography Magazines

Growing up as the kid of working class family in the 1970s, I had little extra money to spend on my photography hobby. I shot with a borrowed camera, used film frugally and developed it myself in my basement darkroom. The things I did splurge on were photography magazines. Each month, I’d stop at the corner drug store and pick up the latest edition of Popular Photography and Modern Photography. They were a buck a piece in those days.

In those pages, I found inspiration and education. They were also my “wish books” for cameras and lenses I could never afford but lusted over nonetheless. Modern Photography lasted 52 years until it combined with Popular in 1989. Popular was in print for 80 years until 2017 when it folded due to declining ad revenues. I have to admit that I miss reading a magazine. There was always something exciting about seeing a new issue on the shelf, taking it home and flipping slowly through the pages.

I bring this up because just this morning, I see that Outdoor Photographer, a magazine I occasionally picked up in the 80s and 90s, has begun publishing a print edition again. It only comes out quarterly, but the publisher promises a higher quality, image-focused product. I am tempted to subscribe out of nostalgia and maybe to help me cut down on screen time. Just not sure about a magazine that costs more than $13 an issue. Even with inflation, that’s a lot.

One Photograph: When Even a Bad Shot Can Be Satisfying

I have been a lover of fall my entire life. Growing up in Upstate New York, those crisp, clear, sunny October and early November days were glorious. Lawn mowing gave way to raking leaves and the frosty mornings and shorter days turned the trees into an infinite palette of yellows, oranges and reds. We had to seize every one of those days because we knew the long, cold, dark winter was right ahead.

Fall on the west coast is a bit more subtle. It comes on slower and lasts longer. And while the lawns turn brown back east, the rainy season here in Northern California turns the grasses deep green which contrast oddly with the changing leaves.

Almost ten years ago today, I was out on a photo walk along a trail that bordered some Sonoma County vineyards. I was carrying my Nikon FM2n and a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens. My camera was loaded with Kodak Portra 160. The trail was separated from the vineyards by a fence. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was shining through the grape leaves. My composition was not good. I could’ve gotten closer to the leaves or kneeled to get a better angle. But I was late for the trail head and I just snapped and moved on.

Despite the technical snafus, I do like the way the sun illuminated the leaves contrasted by the green on the ground from the November rains we had that year. Even a badly composed photograph can be personally satisfying.

A bit later, I found a bigger hole in the fence to shoot through.

A “behind the scenes” shot of the author/photographer.

The Junk Box

I’ve written many times here about my favorite camera store of the past—Lewis Camera Exchange in Tempe, Arizona. For a decade, from 1990 to 2000, it was my go-to destination for everything photographic. One of the things Lewis had, as did most brick and mortar camera stores, was a box or several boxes of “junk.” Typically located right under the front counter, the camera store junk box contained lens caps, filters, cable releases, straps, split rings and other goodies. There were many times I would wander into Lewis looking for this or that and the owner would say…”let me look in the junk box.” One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Over the years, I have assembled my own version of the junk box—actually several small plastic parts boxes full of odds and ends. Some of the parts are from camera systems I no longer own, but I hang onto them anyway because in addition to G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome) there’s also something called the “boomerang effect.” The boomerang effect is when you sell a camera only to find out some time later that you really miss it and you buy another. And I can’t tell you the number of times that the new camera I bought doesn’t have something the old one did—like a flash PC synch cover, an eyepiece diopter or an eyecup. Just recently, I bought a nice Nikon F2 with the DE-1 eye level finder. The F2 had an A-type focusing screen. I prefer the K-type screen and started scrolling eBay looking for one and was shocked to see how expensive they have gotten. On a lark, I decided to look through my junk boxes and lo and behold there was an old K screen I had forgotten I had. Score!

One of my junk boxes

They aren’t making any new parts, so if you are going to use and enjoy vintage cameras, it’s wise to create your own version of the camera store junk box. You just never know what you might need someday.

Getting to know the Nikon ED AF Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 D

In my 50 years of film photography, I have never owned or even used a “big telephoto” lens. The closest thing was probably a Nikon AF Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6D I bought when I had my Nikon N90s in the 1990s. Lately, I have been enjoying making some pictures of our Golden Retrievers at play and especially when we take them to a nearby dog training facility that has a pool where they can swim. In those instances, I wanted a lens that would allow me to really get in close and capture the action.

As I looked at various options and read reviews, my research eventually took me to a legacy Nikon lens; the 80-200 ED AF-D f/2.8 constant aperture beast. The 80-200/2.8 was Nikon's absolute top-of-the-line professional telephoto zoom at its introduction in 1997. This lens is made of metal, it’s heavy, quiet, super-fast focusing and optically amazing. Mounted on my Nikon F5, this kit is formidable and weapon-like.

80-200 Nikkor on my Nikon F5

I’m used to walking around with 50mm standard prime lens on my F5 or at the most, my 85mm f/1.8. This lens took some getting used to. There’s a tripod collar on the lens and if I didn’t have to be moving around a lot near the pool, it would have been easier to work off of a tripod. But I needed to be mobile and get a workout, so I put my most comfortable Peak Design camera strap on the F5, loaded up some Kodak Tri-X and gave my new lens a test drive.

You can tell that this is a professional lens. Fit and finish is extraordinary and despite its weight and size, it balances perfectly in your hand on a camera like the F5. I really thought that shooting in bright sunlight into water, this lens would hunt and peck for focus, but it was fast, quiet and sure.

With a camera like the Nikon F5, it is easy to burn through 36 exposures. The only color film I had in my camera bag that day was some Kodak Portra 800, so I spooled that up and continued shooting.

I didn’t do any post processing of any of these images. They are all straight out of the camera. Not perfect by any means as I am still learning my way around this lens set up. But I had fun. And so did the pups.

The Gossen Luna Pro F

I love old handheld light meters. I rarely use them in my workflow, as most of my film cameras have built-in meters, but I love them just the same and will grab one when I shoot my meter-less Nikon F. I have a small collection; a couple of Westons, three Sekonics, a Minolta, a Gossen Pilot and now this Luna Pro F.

Gossen has been making light meters since the 1930s. My Luna Pro F is from the early 1980s. Most of the light meters available new today feature digital readouts. I’ve always been partial to the good old analog dial readouts. Problem is, some of the old analog light meters can be science projects to use and hard to read. I like simple…and that’s what attracted me to this meter. The Luna Pro F is powered by a 9-volt battery—the same kind you’ll find in a battery-powered smoke detector. Some of the earlier Gossen meters were powered by 1.35v Mercury batteries. The meter can take reflected, incident or flash readings.

The Luna Pro F is unique as it’s a null or zero-point measurement instrument. I have found it to be one of the easiest to use and most intuitive exposure meters I have ever tried. Here is how it works:

Decide which kind of reading you are taking. In this case, I am taking a reflected reading. To do this, move the spherical diffuser to the side. If I were taking an incident reading, the diffuser would be in the center.

Point the meter at your subject and press the power button.

The needle will move left or right.

Now turn the dial until the needle points to zero.

Then, simply look at the dial and select your choice of shutter speed and aperture.

If you want to under expose or over expose, move the dial so the needle points one under or one over or whatever you would like. There is also a scale for cameras that use the exposure value (EV) system as well as one for motion picture film. A button below the power switch allows you to take a reading off of your flash.

Yes, I know…a smartphone light meter app can do the same thing and faster…but it’s not as much fun. If you are looking for a good analog meter that’s easy to use and presents exposure information clearly, I highly recommend the Gossen Luna Pro F. Now I have to go put some film in the Nikon F.