Sunday Chores -- Cooking and Testing Leica and Rollei Shutter Speeds
/Today I cooked up a big pot of vegan stew. With all of the right spices and veggies, it resembles beef stew.
With two new-to-me cameras in my possession, I’m going through the process of testing the very old (70-years old) shutters to see if they’re working correctly. I know that they’re opening and closing properly — that’s not always the case with old cameras — but I need to know exactly how fast the shutter speeds are if I want to get consistent exposures. To do that, I photograph a gray card at every shutter speed, changing the aperture so that each shot has the same exposure value. In theory, each exposure will create a negative of the same density. The only way to know if all is well is to check the negatives when they return from the lab. If the shutter speeds are way off, the gray card won’t be gray — it will be either too bright or too dark, depending on whether the shutter speeds are too slow or fast. With vintage cameras, the shutter speeds usually get slower with age.
