I just bought a 1968-era Twin Lens Reflex camera. Help me find a period-correct light meter!

In My Humble Opinion
1

As the subject says, help me find a period-correct light meter for my new-to-me vintage TLR camera.

On a total whim, I ordered a Mamiya C220 TLR camera, a model made from 1968-1982.

Mamiya C220 TLR

I have been a serious photographer for the past fifteen or twenty years, and I love black-and-white photography, and I suddenly felt the urge to go back to the old days where we would very carefully use our 24 shots (or 12, as is the case here) and have them processed at a film lab. I felt that photography was different in the days before we could use the shotgun approach toward good photographs. And I have always felt that a TLR with the look-down viewfinder is a much more approachable kind of camera for street photography–people love to see old cameras like this one.

This camera is totally mechanical and manual, with no light meter, so I will need one. I have just ordered a fairly modern spot light meter that will arrive along with the camera and 5 rolls of B&W film, so I’m good for my first outing.

With that said, what would be a nice period-correct light meter that I could look for in the future that would do the job? Of course I can use my iPhone or use the modern spot light meter I ordered, but I would also love to use the gear from the time.

2

Here’s a list of Sekonics and when they were manufactured:

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Sekonic

We had some old timey Sekonics growing up from the 70s or early 80s, but I have no idea which model it was offhand.

ETA: Actually, the L-428 looks pretty familiar to me.

3

I recommend a Gossen Luna Pro SBC. It looks the part and is just new enough that it’s unlikely to require re-calibration. Most critically, it takes a standard 9 volt battery, where many older meters (including a bunch from the Gossen Luna line that all look super cool) use a no-longer-available mercury battery. If you use a modern coin cell, the voltage is all wrong leading to very inaccurate light readings.

I have a bunch of older light meters and all of them from prior to the SBC are either way off, totally busted, or are working now only because I spent an endless amount of time recalibrating them.

You can probably do better on price than the ebay link I posted. That was just the first one I found.

Here’s an interesting ebay auction.

4

Thanks for the heads-up on the mercury battery issue. I would definitely need to get one that would work correctly with a modern battery.

Both the older Sekonic and the Gossen Luna Pro you guys mentioned look great.

My “window” would be anywhere between 1968 and 1982, with perhaps 1975 being the “butter zone”

5

Here are four in one batch!
Pick the one that suits your mood that day.

6

I think a number of those are selenium-based sensors, known to more or less ‘wear out’ as the cells degrade. They are effectively unable to recalibrate.

7

First of all, nice camera!

This. I have a couple of Sekonics I’ve had for decades. I’ve given up on them. When I need a meter, I use my Minolta.

8

I remember being impressed by Dirck Halstead’s story of finding the famous Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton image that he shot.

I have a theory that every time the shutter captures a frame, that image is recorded, at a very low threshold in the brain of the photographer. I have heard this over and over from photographers around the world. It doesn’t matter if the photographer saw the processed image or not. These split seconds, as the mirror returns, are recorded as “photographic lint” on the mind of the photographer.

When the photographs of Monica Lewinsky, in her beret, on the lawn of the White House, emerged in February of this year, I KNEW I had seen that face with the President. I had no idea when, or where.

9

Thanks all for your suggestions. I’m going to be one of those annoying folks who says “Can you all help me with X” and then says “Ok, I decided on Y instead,” but hear me out…

After my first rolls of film I realized that maybe I ought not try to use some piece of equipment that is not predictable–the camera is already enough of a wildcard by itself–I just want to have good metering and hopefully a nice look.

The shutter turns out to be 1/2 stop slow, and I have no idea if the focus is good yet (ground glass for testing that is on its way). So I don’t want to add more vintage mystery to the equation right now.

I ended up ordering one of these:
Doomo shoe-mount light meter

It looks surprisingly period-correct hanging off the side of my TLR camera, and it works nicely.
I spent an hour with it attached to my X100 in full manual mode taking photos, and it is accurate enough for the kind of work I am doing.

ETA: So how do I handle the 1/2 stop overexposure? Easy-peasy: the ISO setting on that meter is simply a disk that moves the F scale as you rotate it. Just twist it so it is half way between 400 and 800 and that will compensate for the extra half stop the slow shutter adds.

10

I’d say! I have a layman’s knowledge of photography at best but, with all the modern equipment and onboard computer tech that devices have these days, I can take a darn good picture. I can crop it, lighten it, tone it a little, etc. The stuff the OP is talking about? If you handed it to me, I’d look at you and say, “Um … okay … now what do I do?”

11

There are a number of people out there still doing what’s known as a CLA (clean, lube, adjust) on vintage shutters. It’s great that you identified that it’s a 1/2 stop slow, but that’s generally a sign that oil is getting gummy and friction is rising. That’s often not a stable place to be, meaning that it might get unpredictably worse. Given how expensive film and developing is these days, getting that shutter fixed up seems like a no-brainer.

I’ve got two Kodak Medalist IIs out for service right now and anxious to get them back. The flip side of that story is that some shutters can be set to work smoothly but still never get to dead on accuracy (and there’s some question about what the tolerances used to be on the best day ). The Graphex shutter in my Crown Graphic for example needs springs that don’t really exist in new form anymore. So I got a nice calibration card that lists what the “real” shutter speeds are.

12

I totally agree with your assessment.

This would probably not be financially sound, as these lenses sell for much less than the work would cost, and the shutter mechanism is in the lens. I am imagining that such service would be north of $250 at least.

There are videos out there of guys doing this process on their own on Mamiya TLR lenses, so I might just venture forth to scary places and follow their instructions–after procuring another lens (perhaps a portrait lens) so I can use the camera in the interim. If I screw it up, I’ll just find another 80mm lens.

For now, I’ll treat this like the various ailments I discuss with my doctor: “Let’s keep an eye on that…” The camera is my age, so it makes sense!

13

I don’t have an answer for the OP, but it reminded me of the first SLR I ever purchased in 1968, the Minolta SR1s. Note the mechanically-linked light meter. Clever, but a bit unwieldy. I bought it in the PX in Vietnam. I really wanted the SRT-101, which had through the lens metering, but couldn’t scrape up the cash for it.

14

I think my Graphex shutter CLA was $150, but I get your point. These shutters are not super complex in the big scheme of things. I like the idea of learning how to do it yourself. I considered tearing into my Medalists myself but those apparently are a bad place to start as there are a bunch of complicated linkages and a difficult to adjust rangefinding mechanisms tucked awkwardly into the telescoping lens.

If you go the DIY route, there are some nice, inexpensive shutter speed testers (one example; I’ve seen much cheaper too) available now that are based off the Arduino platform. I built one myself but it’s super dodgy. It’s nice to know the actual shutter speed one way or the other.

15

Yesterday I was chatting with a friend at work who is equally geeky and we discussed the problem and were going over how easy it would be to make an Arduino-based device that would use a phototransistor and time the flicker of light seen through the lens to the microsecond, displaying it. We had it all worked out.

Then last night I googled it and found that it has already been done by many others before me.

For now I use the 240FPS mode of my GoPro on the slower shutter speeds with a stopwatch in frame to keep the video honest. I discovered that iPhone slo-mo mode cheats and will drop back to 170fps or so if it feels like it. GoPro doesn’t cheat.

Oh well!

16

Yeah, my setup is a phototransistor and an Arduino. The challenge with my home brew unit is that it’s extremely finicky (and hates LED light sources - it captures the PWM frequency and not the shutter) in that it is very sensitive to where it is related to the center of the image circle.

With a leaf shutter, there is a non-zero amount of time where the shutter is not very fully open, or on the way to closing without being fully closed. Better units know how to integrate the light from the opening and closing phases.

It’s even more complex with curtain shutters. Testers built for that scenario need to measure a bunch of stuff related to the motion of the first curtain relative to the second curtain. Fortunately, I don’t worry about any of that as all of my vintage cameras that I use have leaf shutters. But if I ever needed to know shutter speed on my semi-retired Olympus 35RC, I guess I’d have to buckle down and learn a little more.

17

For the leaf shutter I was kind of figuring light would ramp up and down, so it wouldn’t be a square wave. Then just pick the midpoint of the ramp (if it were only so easy). For curtain shutters I imagined some device where the sensor would be in a long skinny tube (like a pen cartridge, painted flat black inside) so it would only see light from one point as the opening passed overhead. Again, it probably would fail in actual practice.

If I were an electronics kind of guy (and I certainly am not) I would have an oscilloscope, and that would surely make the measurement process easy peasy.

18

Yeah, for longer shutter speeds, a square wave is a really good approximation of the shutter opening. It’s when you get to 1/500th and such that the opening and closing ramp become something to worry about, and unfortunately, those fast speeds are the ones I’m worried about as those are the first victims to general wear. Gumminess and weak booster springs are a real pain when it comes to fast speeds.

As I understand it, for the curtain shutters, one reason the measurement process is complicated is that the person testing usually needs to understand what’s not quite right, so understanding the independent motions of both curtains is part of the diagnostic process. As in, the curtains slow down in part of the travel due to wear, leading to over- or under-exposure only on part of the image.

19

If you don’t have the moment and the light, no amount of post-processing is going to turn a crappy photo into a darned good one. Though, to be honest, we might not be all that far off at least as far as lighting is concerned.

20

I totally agree with you. Modern digital photography is an amazing thing and enables us much more latitude in post and takes care of much of the fiddly work with exposure settings and focus. The old process shouldn’t exist for the sake of the process itself, and modern tools make photography much more approachable by the average person.

With that said, the key reason why I am getting started in medium format photography with an old camera is that I want to slow everything down so that I can feel I really am a part of the creative process.

On Sunday I went to our local Veterans’ Park and shot a couple of rolls.
First change was that each roll has 12 shots, so that is a bit of a self-limiting factor.

Then, as I went to photograph a particularly interesting statue, I had to choose an aperture I liked for artistic effect, then measure the light carefully and adjust the shutter speed. I had the camera on a tripod. This all allowed a methodical approach to positioning things.

I wound the film to the first frame and manually cocked the shutter.

Then I used a small magnifier on the ground glass of the look-down viewfinder to carefully bring the image into tight focus.

Only after all of this did I press the shutter release.

Then I carefully wrote down the frame number, exposure settings, weather, and other details about the shot in my log book.

The slow deliberate pace introduces a different artistic aspect to photography. It feels like I am really approaching the soul of photography. In contrast, I took digital B&W photos of each shot with my Fujifilm X100 at the same time for comparison, and that really felt like an afterthought.

One additional feature of my medium-format camera that I love is the square format image–we are so used to the traditional wide or tall photo shape, so working in square format is also a different artistic challenge. I’m certain my composition sucks at this point; hopefully it will improve.

Now I have to wait two weeks for the photos to come back from the lab in Los Angeles. That part is going to get old fast–I see B&W film developing in my very near future.