Light (or exposure) meters

Light meters (which are also called exposure meters) are a modern invention and early photographers had to guess their exposures and rely on experience to get it right.  An early system used to make guessing easier was to use the Sunny 16 rule which says:

• "On a sunny day set aperture to f16 and shutter speed to the [reciprocal of the] ISO film speed [or ISO setting] for a subject in direct sunlight." 

 (from Bernhard J. Suess (2003). Mastering Black-and-White Photography, Allworth Communications. ISBN 1-58115-306-6)  So, if you are using Ilford FP4 film, which is ISO 125, on a sunny day you set the aperture to f16 and the shutter speed to 1/125 seconds.  This will generally give you a usable picture even if not a perfectly exposed one.  You do need to be aware that the amount of light on a sunny beach will be more than the amount of light in a sunny field - entirely due to the amount of reflected light.  You can easily adjust either the aperture or the shutter speed to compensate.  You also need to be aware that the amount of light present on a sunny day depends on how close to the equator you are.  A photographer in Norway using the Sunny 16 rule will get a very different result than a photographer in Nigeria would.  I have been trying this Sunny 16 rule out in Lincoln this week and in the middle of the day it produced the same exposure as my Ikophot exposure meter suggested.  By four in the afternoon, the Sunny 16 rule was a whole stop out.

A better system was the extinction meter.  This used a piece of translucent celluloid that was painted black apart from a series of grey numbers.  Each number was printed in a darker shade of grey than the last number.  So, in my Braun Paxette, the number 1 is nearly white and the number 16 is nearly black.  In use, the user looks through the extinction meter and notes the darkest number that is visible.  This number is then looked up in an exposure table to get suitable aperture and shutter speeds.  This picture of my Braun Paxette show one of these tables.  It is set up for 50 ASA (ISO) film and tells you to halve the exposure for 100 ASA film and double it for 12 ASA film (films were much slower then than we are used to now).  This chart refers to 'diaphragm' rather than 'aperture' but it is the same thing.

Extinction meter table on my Braun Paxette

These, although simple and not able to go wrong, had their drawbacks.  They depended on the quality of the eye sight of the user and that is very variable.

The next development was the electronic light meter.  Initially, these had a cell made from selenium that produced a small electrical voltage on exposure to light.  This voltage was then used to move a needle across a scale.  This needle would then point to an arbitrary number that has to be set on a scale.  The scale then indicates a range of appropriate aperture and shutter speeds.  It is tempting to think of these as EV numbers but they are not - at least are not on the three light meters I own.  These worked very well in reasonable light but were poor performers in poor light.  These fell out of fashion and were replaced by CdS meters.  The advantage of selenium meters is that they do not need a battery to work.  A big disadvantage is that they lose sensitivity with time.  Towards the end of their useful life they give a low reading which will eventually cause over-exposed photographs.  For this reason, some people will not use old selenium meters but my old (fifty years old, plus) meters all agree with my modern light meters.

 I suspect that the rate of deterioration depends on how the meter has been stored over the years.  If the meter is in the dark inside a case apart from when actually taking a reading, the deterioration doesn't seem to matter over a period of sixty or so years.

The next development was the CdS meter (Cadmium Sulphide).  These do not produce a voltage on exposure to light but act as a resistor that changes its resistance to electricity on exposure to light.  These always need a battery to work to provide the voltage.  Most modern light meters work this way.  These work in much lower light levels and do not significantly deteriorate with time.  The draw back with these is that battery technology changes and it can be hard (or impossible) to find batteries for older CdS meters.  In particular, mercury batteries are no longer made and the modern equivalents produce a different voltage which alters the accuracy of the meters.

A lot of meters from the 1950s used what are called Exposure Values (EV).  The idea is that you set your shutter to the indicated EV and this sets a combination of shutter speed and aperture.  As you then alter the aperture, the shutter speed will alter in unison - and vice versa.  I like the system but many people do not.

Here is a table of EVs and their associated aperture/shutter speeds:

 

Table 1. Exposure times, in seconds or minutes (m), for various exposure values and f-numbers
EV	f-number
	1	1.4	2	2.8	4	5.6	8	11	16	22
−6	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m	32 m	64 m	128 m	256 m	512 m
−5	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m	32 m	64 m	128 m	256 m
−4	15	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m	32 m	64 m	128 m
−3	8	15	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m	32 m	64 m
−2	4	8	15	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m	32 m
−1	2	4	8	15	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m	16 m
0	1	2	4	8	15	30	60	2 m	4 m	8 m
1	1/2	1	2	4	8	15	30	60	2 m	4 m
2	1/4	1/2	1	2	4	8	15	30	60	2 m
3	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2	4	8	15	30	60
4	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2	4	8	15	30
5	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2	4	8	15
6	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2	4	8
7	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2	4
8	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2
9	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2	1
10	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4	1/2
11	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8	1/4
12	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/8
13	1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30	1/15
14		1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30
15			1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60
16				1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125
17					1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250
18						1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500
19							1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000
20								1/8000	1/4000	1/2000
21									1/8000	1/4000
EV	1	1.4	2	2.8	4	5.6	8	11	16	22
	f-number

To my light meters:

I have four old meters, each of the selenium type.  They are a Weston Master III, a Leningrad 4, a Ikophot and a Bewi Automat.  The Weston does not work - I tried to adjust the zero setting and managed to wreck the meter.  The blame for this lies entirely with me, not Weston’s design or manufacturing standards.

First, the Weston.

This is a Weston Master III

Weston Master III

It is the most complicated meter of the three I have - presumably it will do more than the other two.  The draw backs for me is firstly there is no ASA or DIN setting, it uses instead Weston values which are their own proprietary system. As films do not come with a Weston speed marked on them, it makes it unnecessarily difficult to use.  Secondly, I find the plethora of black and white marking difficult to distinguish.  As I mentioned earlier, I managed to break this meter, so my complaints about it are moot.

Secondly, Leningrad 4:

Leningrad 4

This is much simpler in layout than the Weston and much easier to use.  The needle points at red numbers, these red numbers are then set against a large pointer on the other end of the meter and the aperture/shutter speed combination are read off a black and white scale.  The film speed can be set in either ASA or DIN and will work with modern films with ISO speeds as they are the same as ASA.  A note of caution:  these red numbers are NOT Exposure Values - they seem to be arbitrary numbers and are different to the equivalent numbers on the Ikophot meter.

Thirdly, Zeiss Ikon Ikophot:

Zeiss Ikon Ikophot

This mirrors the Leningrad in as much as the meter needle points to red numbers and the red numbers are then aligned against a red pointer.  The aperture/shutter speed combination is then read off the scale - aperture in black and shutter speed in white on red.  Again, film speed can be set in either ASA or DIN.  A note of caution:  these red numbers are Exposure Values but only for 50 ASA/18 DIN film (I expect 50 ASA/18 DIN was seen as standard by Zeiss Ikon).  It is possible to use them directly on cameras with a EV scale on the shutter, but you will need to adjust for the speed of the film you are using.  This is simple enough - for 100 ASA, 21 DIN film, subtract 1 from the EV; for 200 ASA, 24 DIN film subtract 2 from the EV and for 400 ASA, 27 DIN film, subtract 3 from the EV.

The DIN/ASA scales on this meter are a bit unique.  DIN 21 SHOULD be ASA 100, but it is ASA 80.   I use the DIN exclusively and that works just fine.  I suspect using the ASA scale would also be fine as the difference between 80 and 100 is fairly small (1/3 of a stop).  As DIN is a German standard and Zeiss Ikon are a German firm, I would expect them to get DIN right.

Not cheap - it cost £10/13/5 in 1957 - which was just over an average man's weekly wage (so about £500 in 2013 values).

This is the meter I most often use as it is nicely made, feels good in the hand and produces satisfactory results.  A scanned copy of the Ikophot manual is available for download as is a scanned copy of Zeiss Ikon's 1930s exposure guide.

Lastly, my Bertram Bewi Automat.

Bertram Bewi Automat

This is a German meter (made in West Germany).  Bertram have been making light meters since 1928 . This meter works differently from the meters above.  For one thing, it has a digital read-out rather than an analogue needle pointing to a scale. 

The meter is rather larger than is usual for analogue meter - it measures 90 x 65 x 25 mm not including the activating button.  It is encased in ivory plastic.

 The only control is a ring to set the film speed.  This is calibrated in ranges. For instance, the DIN setting is a range of three numbers - 11-13, 14-16, 17-19, 20-22, 23-25.  That is one stop difference between each range.  Given the exposure latitude of film that is plenty accurate enough.  There are also ranges for ASA and Weston (ASA is the same as ISO and Weston is a defunct film speed system devised by the makers of the Weston series of exposure meters.

Using the meter is also different to analogue meters.  If you point this meter at the scene you intend to photograph, nothing happens.  You need to point the meter, depress the activating button for about three seconds and release.  Once you have done this, the shutter speed scale lines itself up with the aperture scale and you can read off suitable combinations of aperture and shutter speed.

The read out also has exposure values indicated - under L on the aperture scale.  These are adjusted for film speed and can be set directly on an EV enabled shutter.
 

Kodak Brownie Vecta

Kodak Brownie Vecta

Kodak had a long series of Brownie cameras.  These were the cheap and cheerful range and varied greatly over time. 

This article is about the Brownie Vecta which was made in the UK and presumably only available here.  I was given one of these for a birthday present when I was was eleven or twelve years old when it was a strikingly modern looking camera.  It was designed for Kodak by the British industrial designer Kenneth Grange and its 'natural' format is portrait as that is what Kenneth Grange assumed it would mostly be used for.

The Vecta was only in production for three years (from 1963 to 1966).  It is basically a grey plastic cuboid with a central lens and a viewfinder in one corner.  The shutter release is a white bar underneath the lens.  It takes 127 film which is hard to find nowadays but is still available (see Ag-photographic for supplies).

The lens is a simple meniscus lens with no focussing.  I have not been able to find out what the focal length of this lens is but it is significantly wide-angle for 127 film. It works by having a very small aperture - f14 - which gives a large depth of field. The big downside of this is that the camera has to have a slow shutter speed to compensate.  Kodak colour film produced at the time that this cameras was current had a speed of ASA 64 so we probably looking at a shutter speed of around 1/30 second.  My test film for this camera shows reasonable image quality at a print size of 4" by 6" (100mm by 150 mm) which is as large as they would have been printed in 1963.  In fact, the surviving pictures that I have from August 1968 were printed at 21/2 by 4 inches at which resolution the quality is fine.

Kodak also produced a 'supplementary' lens that fitted over the fixed lens that allowed close-ups to be taken.  I had one of these which had to be used with the printed instructions to get acceptable focussing distances.  This did not work too well as distances became critical and the viewfinder produced parallax errors so I never had a real idea of what I was actually photographing.  I gave up on using the close-up lens fairly quickly.

This camera was easy for a child to use - I certainly do not remember any problems in using it at age eleven or twelve.  There are indentations in the cube to facilitate holding the camera steady - and with a shutter speed of 1/30(ish) a steady hand is essential. I really enjoyed this camera as a child and still found it nice to use. The position of the shutter release and the fact that it is a bar rather than a button takes a bit of getting used to but nothing untoward. It was probably easier for me at age eleven as I had not then become used to using more sophisticated cameras and a bottom shutter release was all that I knew.

Test pictures from this camera:

Baggholm Road, Lincoln

Busker, High Street, Lincoln

 At this size they look OK but when enlarged (to beyond the size that was anticipated by the designers) the defects show up.  When putting the first roll of film through a "new" old camera, it is usual for the film to attract dirt from the recesses of the camera.  This shows up as black specs on the final print.  These pictures have instead white specs and very pronounced grain which suggests a film or processing fault.  I cannot tell which, but I am sure it is not the camera.

Busker, High Street, Lincoln - enlarged to show marks

Braun Paxette

My latest purchase is a Braun Paxette.  I am not entirely sure of the model - it seems to be a variant on the Paxette I - it has a Roeschlein-Kreuznach lens and a lever film winder.  This camera is fairly heavy for its size (that it to say, solid!).  It measures 11.5 cm wide by 6 cm high and 6 cm deep.  The Braun that made this camera is Braun of Nurnberg - there being at least one other Braun company making cameras.  I also have a different Braun Paxette model, the Paxette IIM - details here.

While this camera is not quite of the quality of the Voigtlander Vito B, it is a well made camera and was far from cheap when new.  Wallace Heaton (a photographic retailer) was advertising this in 1952 at £24/10/6 (in old money. That equates to £24.52 in new money and is equivalent to around £1,500 at 2013 values).

Braun Paxette

lens: Pointar
focal length:  45mm
apertures: f2.8 to f16
focus range: 3 feet to infinity
lens fitting: fixed
shutter: Prontor SVS
speeds: 1,1/2, 1/5, 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/300
flash: PC socket, X and M
film size: 35mm

The back is removed by unscrewing a ring around the tripod boss on the base.  The back, base and half the front then come away as one piece.   The new film cassette is held securely by a swivelling arm which makes this camera much easier to load than the Zeiss Ikon Contaflex cameras which also have the base and back come away in one piece but have nothing to hold the new cassette until the loading is finished and the back/base replaced.  In my camera, the new film is held beneath a plate that must be hinged out of the way before the film is loaded.  This plate then acts as the pressure plate that keeps the film flat - there are a couple of springs in the back that keep this plate snug against the film.  In other Paxette models, there is only a small clip to secure the film while loading.

The shutter is a Gauthier Prontor SVS which offers the usual speeds - 1,1/2, 1/5, 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/300 and B - as well as M and X flash synchronisation and V (vorlaufwerk = delay) and has a PC flash connector.  The shutter release is on the side of the shutter housing.  As this shutter is cocked by winding the film, it is very easy to take photographs by mistake.  In use, it is going to be necessary to wind the film on just before taking the next picture.

The lens is a Pointar lens made by Roeschlein- Kreuznach.  This is a 45 mm lens and is coated (at least, the lens bezel has a red "C" on it which I assume means it is coated).  Roeschlein were a small lens designer and manufacturer in Kreuznach set up in the 1940s and sold to Sill Optics in 1962.  Their lenses were mostly designed to order but they made several lenses for the Paxette range of cameras.  This lens does not seem to have a very good reputation but I will judge for myself when I see the results of my test film.

Film advance is by way of a short lever which needs to be turned full travel twice to fully advance the film.  In earlier versions of the Paxette, film advance was with a knob only and I suspect this has merely had a lever attached rather than being redesigned as a lever advance.   The film rewind is a knob on the left side of the top plate.  This needs to be pulled up fully to engage the rewind mechanism.  In the rest position, it is not connected to anything which I originally mistook to mean the film was not attached properly as the rewind knob does not turn as the film is advanced.

The extinction meter is simplicity itself to use.  You look through the right-hand window at a series of numbers.  The faintest number you can see indicates the required exposure - this number is looked up on a chart on the rear of the leather every-ready case to get the aperture/speed combination required.  Downsides:  you need to look at the numbers for a long time (20 seconds is suggested in the manual) to allow your eye to adjust to the available light and you need to have the case with you at all times to access the chart.  This actually works quite well.  I have been comparing the exposure suggested by the extinction meter with the reading from my Zeiss Ikon Ikophot meter and they pretty much agree.

The frame counter is in a slightly sunken recess in the top plate and counts down to zero, so needs to be set with the length of the film loaded.  This recess also doubles as an accessory shoe - a cold shoe in flash terms.

This camera is not the easiest to use. The viewfinder is too small to use while wearing my glasses and the shutter release has a hair trigger. Those are my main complaints in using the camera. To hold, it is very much like the Voigtlander Vito B - the same size, weight and basic shape. I suspect the Braun designers had a Vito B in mind when they were designing the Paxette I. Apart from squinting through the viewfinder, I enjoyed using this camera although I don't think I will bother with the extinction meter again. It is so much easier and quicker to use my Ikophot or Leningrad handheld meters. Loading film while out and about is easy enough - the hardest part is finding somewhere to put the removed back/base while fiddling with the film.

Some sample pictures from this camera.  These were taken with a colour film that was several years past its best before date and had not been stored properly - hence the colour cast and colour noise.  Also, I exposed according to the built-in extinction meter and they were all rather under exposed.  With old film it is usual to give a stop or so extra exposure but this film got to be under exposed.

Best exposure of the bunch

Piano busker

Autumn walk

Jazz buskers

Adjusted pictures for noise and colour cast:

Agfa Silette

Agfa Silette

Agfa used the name 'Silette' for a large range of camera over many years.  Mine is the Silette type 4 from (I think) 1958.

It is a basic 35mm camera which seems to be well made.  It has a Pronto shutter and an Agfa Color-Agnar f2.8 lens.  It has a double viewfinder - the opaque window adds brightness to the frame lines in the clear window.  There is no light meter nor a rangefinder in this model although both were available in other cameras in the Silette range.

As this is a typical basic camera, there is little to say.  The shutter is a Pronto four speed shutter - 1/30, 1/60, 1/125 and 1/250 seconds plus 'B'.  It also has a timer delay which works well (even though the general advice is not to try the self timer on old cameras).  On a fifty-plus year old camera, this shutter seems to be at least adequately accurate.

The lens is an Agfa Color-Agnar lens - not a lens I have come across before.   This is a Crooke's Triplet lens - originally designed in 1893 in England but still in use today.  My camera came with a cassette of film already loaded, so I tried the camera out with that.  The results were decent - especially when I removed the cassette and looked at the inner surface of the lens which was very dirty (but without any trace of fungus).  This lens is clearly coated - there is a blueish/purplish hue to the glass - but the lens is very susceptible to flare.

One fault with this particular specimen is the light seals.  These have obviously failed at some point and have been replaced with black wool.  This is not a technique that works.  I shall shortly replace the wool with black foam.

The viewfinder is clear with bright-lines for framing the picture - including parallax lines for close-ups.  There is a film speed reminder on the rewind knob.  This is not as easy to adjust as it could be - you need to lift the rewind knob (as if rewinding the film) and turn a knurled ring underneath the knob.  A sign of the age of this camera is the range of ASA speeds that are available - 14, 16, 17, 40, 100, 250, 650 - you would be hard pressed to find ASA 16 film now.  Kodachrome slide film was made as ASA 16 in the 1950s - the time of this camera - and Kodacolor print film was ASA 32.  Ilford monochrome film of the time had a speed rating of about ASA 160.

The exposure counter in at the centre of the base showing on the back of the camera.  Alongside this is the serial number - VI 2457 in my case.

The camera is marked as "Made in Germany" (i.e. West Germany).  There is sometimes confusion about Agfa cameras as Agfa sold the rights to the names and designs in North America to Ansco who continued to make "Agfa" cameras for some time separately from Agfa Germany.  This is not an Ansco camera.

Olympus PEN EE (half frame)

Olympus PEN EE (Marque 2)

I have been keeping half an eye out for a PEN for some time and this one came up on Ebay.  It is the second marque EE made in March 1966 (the date of manufacture can be found by removing the film pressure plate.  There is a two digit code there.  The first digit is the year, the second digit is the month.  The code on mine is 63 which could be 1966 or 1976 but the EE was only made until 1966 so the manufacture year must be 1966).  This is my third Olympus camera, the others being a Trip and an OM10.

The camera is surprisingly heavy - it has an all-metal construction with the main body being cast from aluminium alloy.  The EE (Electric Eye) can be distinguished from other PEN cameras by the ring of the exposure meter around the lens.  The camera is small - 105 mm by 65 mm and 45 mm thick.  There are two strap lugs and the camera comes with a plastic wrist strap.  It also comes with a leatherette bag which is a very tight fit.  I think mine might have shrunk.

Rear view

The shutter is a Copal shutter with two speeds - 1/30 and 1/250.  Normally, the camera uses the 1/250 shutter speed, the 1/30 being reserved for flash use.  There is a manual over-ride of sorts in as when you attach a flash gun, you need to set the aperture  according to the guide number of the flash.  This sets the shutter speed to 1/30 and disables the automatic exposure system.  You can use this without the flash for use in poor light.  1/30 for a shutter speed might seem a bit on the slow side for a hand held camera but the focal length of the lens is 28 mm and the recommended slowest shutter speed for 35 mm photographer is the reciprocal of the focal length so the minimum speed here is 1/28 .

The lens is a D. Zuiko 28mm f3.5 lens.  The 'D' prefix indicates that there are four elements (pieces of glass) in the lens.  This suggests that this is a Tessar copy.  The standard lens for a camera is taken to be the diagonal of the negative (or sensor for digital cameras).  The negative is 18 mm by 24 mm so the diagonal (using Pythagoras's Theorem) is 30 mm.  This means that a standard lens for this camera will be 30 mm so the 28 mm lens is very slightly wide angle.  This lens takes two different filter sizes.  The smaller filter size is 22.5 mm and the filter fits over the lens but inside the exposure meter sensor.  My PEN has a UV filter in this place.  The lens also takes larger, 43.5 mm filters which fit over the exposure meter sensor which means that the camera automatically takes account of light adsorption by the filter.

Vertical viewfinder

The viewfinder is a bit strange at first use.  It is vertical (portrait format) rather than the more usual horizontal (landscape format) viewfinders on other cameras.  This is because the camera is a half-frame camera - only half a normal frame of film is exposed at one time.  This means that the pictures are vertical in the roll of film.  This doesn't really matter - it just means you have to turn the camera on to its side for landscapes rather than for portraits.  In use, it really doesn't matter.

This camera is very easy to use.  It is small enough to use entirely one handed - ideal for street photography - the shutter release and wind-on wheel both falling naturally under the fore-finger and thumb respectively, even with my large hands.  The wrist strap keeps the camera near enough tom the hand that it can be picked up one handed.  Being a one-handed camera, turning the camera for landscape is so easy.  Once the film is loaded, there are no setting to make - or, indeed, possible.  This is strictly a point and shoot camera.

30-7-2013:

I now have a test film from this camera developed and scanned.  Here are the results.  At this size (4" by 3") they look OK.  They do not bear enlarging much above this size.  To be fair to Olympus, the market this camera was aimed at would have been happy with 4x3 prints (this camera dates from the mid-1960s) and relatively small prints is all that was on offer as a matter of course.

These pictures were taken in Bamburgh in Northumbria.

Zeiss Ikon Contessa LKE

Zeiss Ikon Contessa LKE

Zeiss Ikon Contessa LKE

This is a fairly simple compact camera along the lines of Zeiss Ikon's other Ikonta derivatives, the Contina family.  It is small enough to fit comfortably in one hand - 115mm wide by 85mm tall by 35 mm thick (75 mm thick including the lens).  It takes 35 mm film in standard cassettes.  The Contessa range was made from 1960 until 1971 and the Contessa LKE was made from 1963 to 1965.  The name "Contessa" is a look-back to the companies that made up Zeiss Ikon in 1926 - one of which was Contessa Nettel.  This camera owes nothing to that make of camera and nothing to Contessa Nettel's designer, Dr Nagel.

This camera has a coupled light meter and a coupled rangefinder.  Both of these are visible in the viewfinder which makes using the camera easy.  The rangefinder if the usual double image in an orange spot in the middle of the field of view.  Turning the focussing ring on the end of the lens moves one image - focus is achieved when the two images are superimposed.  A nice touch is the addition of two prominent plastic lugs on the side of the focussing ring which makes it easy to find it by feel while looking through the viewfinder.   The light meter in the viewfinder is not so easy to see.  It is at the top of the viewfinder in the middle and if this part of the viewfinder is against a bright sky, it disappears completely.  Originally, I found it much easier to use the other light meter view on the top of the camera but with practice the display in the viewfinder is easier to use.  When setting the exposure, it is possible to set either the shutter speed or the aperture and then adjust the other until the meter needle centres in the window.  It is much easier to preset the shutter speed as this is merely a knurled ring - the aperture ring has two plastic lugs much as the focussing ring has and it is so much easier to find the aperture ring by feel than it is the shutter speed ring.  Both the aperture value and the shutter speed are visible at the bottom of the viewfinder - this time much more clearly than the light meter is.

The lens is about as good as they come - a Carl Zeiss Tessar.  Because of the age of this camera (1960s) it is not a Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar but a West German Carl Zeiss Opton Tessar.  Still a very good lens, though.  The serial number of the lens indicates it was made between 1965 and 1969.  As this camera was only in production until 1965, my specimen must be one of the last to be built in 1965.  The focal length is 50mm with a maximum aperture of f2.8 - so this is a vary fast lens - stopped down to f8, it is going to be superb.  The shutter is a Gautier Prontor 500 LK which is a meter-coupled Prontor with a maximum speed of 1/500 (about as fast as any leaf shutter ever will be).  The one thing that I miss on most modern lenses is the depth of field scale that was ubiquitous on lenses of this era and is present here.

The accessory shoe is a hot shoe for flash connection and there is no PC connector for cold shoe flashes (an adapter was available as an added extra to allow cold shoe flashes to be connected).  These is a frame counter around the shutter release and a window that can be moved to indicate the type of film being used.  The options are Black and white, Neg, Flash, Sun, Artificial light.

The viewfinder is central and large enough even for spectacle wearers.  There are bright-lines in the file of view with parallax marks for framing close-ups.  The film advance is a lever of the top right as was now usual for 35mm cameras.  The film rewind, however, is underneath - a lever that pops out when the rewind button is pressed.  There are no strap lugs on this camera which means it is sensible to use the every-ready case but I like to carry cameras in my pocket, so I will end up one day dropping this one.  The only other thing of note is the presence of a tripod bush in the centre of the bottom plate.

After running one roll of film through this camera, I was very pleased with this camera.  It is easy to use, fits in my jacket pocket and is a suitable camera to use as a walk-around camera (i.e. one I take with me when I am not particularly wanting to take photographs but prefer to have a camera to hand just in case).  It is not obtrusive and I have found it to be excellent for street photography.

18 September 2012:  

In the five months that I have owned this camera, this camera has grown on me.  My hands have now learnt where the controls are so I no longer have to look and think.  This probably happens quite quickly if you only use one camera but I have several that I use frequently. 

The exposure indicator is clear in the viewfinder - the arrow for the shutter speed less so.  The exposure indicator is repeated on the top plate but this is not really useful.

I have a tendency to carry cameras in my pocket and that generates two problems with this camera.  Firstly, the shutter release gets accidentally pressed.  This is easily cured by not winding the film on until immediately before pressing the shutter release.  The second problem is that the delayed action lever gets moved which means that it takes a while to take the next picture.  This is made worse by the fact that the delayed action mechanism does not work very well any more.  It grinds its way through the nominal eight seconds with numerous pauses that necessitate manual assistance.   

The rangefinder is reasonably clear in use but as I take mainly landscapes, I keep the camera focussed on the hyper-focal distance (which at f8 is twenty feet).

I really like the recessed rewind lever on the base.  This is a good two centimetres long - much longer than the rewind lever on most 35 mm cameras.  It is easy to use and fairly fast.

The only really awkward part of using this camera is setting the film speed.  As I only set this rarely (I generally use APX100 film so I only reset the film speed when I use a different film) it is not a problem.

Sample pictures:

Spurn ex-lighthouse now water tower

Staithes harbour