so THAT'S how you do it!

[removed account4]

every once in a while i am fiddling around with a piece of photo stuff, and something hits me - it is very obvious, a certain something i had missed for a long time.

for example -
i have a swedish view camera and the back rotates. there is a chrome / nickel thumb screw - it just turns and the back turns. pretty easy. it turns out that the knob also has a second function that it took me 7 years to figure out . the back of the focusing rail ( tailboard ) folds up. and kind of just sits there. for a long time i was using a string to hold it up so it didn't flop around, until i realized there was a a little thing to hold the rail to the knob! i recenly got a 8x10 camera by by the same maker. the guy i bought it from had a BIG elastic to hold the focusing rail to the body of the camera ( a little string won't work with such a big camera i guess ). lucky for me, i knew the secret - and it worked!

now tonight i was loading film into a camera i just started to use. its a leica, and i am still not really comfortable loading it with film. it is a pain in the neck if you ask me, but i guess that is part of the mythos of this camera, so i am doing my best not to shred the film as i try my hardest to awkwardly load. after the 4th attempt of patiently trying to put the spool of fomapan200 into the bottom of the camera. then as i was wrestling with the camera, the magic back door opened up, so i could finally see what i was doing wrong

i LOVE not having a manual, and eventually when all the planets line up, when saturn is retrograde in pisces or when i do just the right thing WRONG the right thing happens to make thing easy.

ever have such good luck?

 

[glbeas]

The only cameras I really needed a manual on has been digigizmos. Anything mechanical I can look at it and figure most of it out by "instinct". Comes from years of shade tree mechaniking.
Electronic junk likes to hide behind it's wiring, without a moving part to look at it's a pure mystery.

 

[Ole]

The only cameras I really needed a manual on has been digigizmos. Anything mechanical I can look at it and figure most of it out by "instinct"...

I thought so too, until I got a FED-2. Only mechanical camera I've ever needed a manual for. I've also looked at the manual for my Pentax Mz5-n.

and I DO have a repair manual for Compur shutters. Very, very nice thing to have.