immutability
Newbie
Hello everyone!
I'm a bit new to these forums, and I'm so lucky to find them! I have borrowed this beautiful Yashica Electro 35 GT from my father, who's no longer using it. I think he bought it in late 70s or early 80s, but it wasn't used much during the past 10+ years (was actually used once or twice during that time). But it is in excellent condition so I bought a B&W film to play with it a little (I already have the equipment to develop the film and photos at home too) 😉
To get to the point, I'm afraid there must be some exposure metering issue or something, and I'd really appreciate any ideas or help from all of you more familiar with this camera.
The symptoms:
Rado
I'm a bit new to these forums, and I'm so lucky to find them! I have borrowed this beautiful Yashica Electro 35 GT from my father, who's no longer using it. I think he bought it in late 70s or early 80s, but it wasn't used much during the past 10+ years (was actually used once or twice during that time). But it is in excellent condition so I bought a B&W film to play with it a little (I already have the equipment to develop the film and photos at home too) 😉
To get to the point, I'm afraid there must be some exposure metering issue or something, and I'd really appreciate any ideas or help from all of you more familiar with this camera.
The symptoms:
- In low light, when the orange "slow" lamp goes on, the shutter seems to behave as if it was in bulb mode. That's what I could see when I was playing with the camera without a film inside. The shutter remains open for as long as you hold the release.
- I've tried this with self-timer too, to see what will happen, and in this case, the shutter was very fast even if the orange lamp was on while pressing the release. This was at f/4 and with ISO 200 film inside in a room where my digital camera would use almost a second (0.8 sec)
- I've also tried this with an extreme aperture setting (f/16) in the same room, but again, and looked straight into the lens (I already have the film inside) and again, it was extremely fast.
- Setting the aperture apparently works - the blades move (I could see that with camera open) and also it changes how camera reacts to light, for example when the red lamp goes on and you go to f/11 or f/16 and then half-press the shutter release, the red lamp will not light up. Same is true for orange lamp.
- Battery - there is still the original battery, which might be years old, but no leaks. I read that without battery the shutter speed would be locked to 1/500s, so I even thought this might be it, but the green battery check lamp comes up, and when I measured the voltage I got 5.83 V (without any load of course, I don't know how these mercury batteries behave when they're old?)
- In the small window behind which the exposure metering thing is hidden (to the left of the lens when you look at the camera) there seem to be 2 blades forming a small diamond-shaped window. The look like if they've been made movable, but the window size is constant regardless of lens aperture. Is this supposed to be like this, or is it supposed to be moving and change amount of light getting through to the sensor?
Rado