Rehabilitating an old camera?

A question for you photography buffs. I asked my father for his old SLR, a hefty, solid Minolta from the early 1970s. It hasn’t been used in over 10 years and I’m now ready to start learning manual photography.

The question is, what do I need to do to get this camera up to speed? Do I need to have it cleaned or checked out by a camera repair shop? Or can I do a quick cleaning of the mirror and lenses and expect it to work? The shutter release and film advance all seem very solid and these old things are indestructible, right?

get a magnifying glass or a jeweler’s loupe and check the interior shutter iris leaves and make sure the platten the film slides across is smooth, clean and functional. As long as nothing is binding, is should work fine. If you do notice any problems with the leaves I would have a camera shop take care of it. Good Luck!

As long as the shutters speeds are correct you should have a good platform to learn photography. I think you can get a cardboard disk with printed strobe marks to check the speeds. Jut put it on your phonograph turntable and… Let me get back to you on this one :smiley:

Clean it gently. Be very careful it it has rubberized silk shutter curtains and take a test roll with it at varaious shutter speeds and apertures. Don’t go by drugstore color prints to judge exposure. Get a calibrated gray card, 18% on one side, 90% white on the other. Put it in direct sunlight, set your aperture to f16 and your shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ASA/ISO film speed. 100 film = 1/125 sec, ASA 400 = 1/500th, etc. The F16 rule applies to most scenes in direct sunlight. From there you’ll need to learn about tone scale of the scene, incident versus reflected light measurement and the zone system. Have fun.

I know I’m showing my age but my favorite camera is my Nikon F2A. It’s been out of production for over 20 years.

Do not touch the camera’s shutter. In most cameras it’s very very delicate. Even a blast of compressed air could screw it up.

If the controls all move smoothly and accurately with no play or grinding, you should be ok. Get some lens cleaner from an eyeglass shop. Never squirt the cleaner directly onto a lens or camera body! Apply it to a lens cleaning cloth (no paper products!) or q-tip. A can of compressed air or a blower brush will get dust out of the nooks and crannies.

If the camera is pretty dirty or dusty, it might be best to have it professionally cleaned. I’ve had several ancient camera bodies done for <$100 each. The came back immaculate and in tip-top condition.

To expand on Padeye’s camera test:

Get a roll of 100 ASA slide film. This will just be a test roll, so you don’t need a slide projector or anything. Use slide because what you want to test will not be visible in prints. (This is because any over- or under-exposure on the negative is corrected when the print is made.) You could just look at the negatives, but it’s easier with slides. And I like slides. Everyone should use slides.

On a clear sunny day, point the camera at the sky, but well away from the sun. No ground, no telephone poles, no clouds, just blue sky. Take a series of exposures at the following settings:

1/2000 at f4
1/1000 at f5.6
1/500 at f8
1/250 at f11
1/125 at f16
1/60 at f22

Take note of which exposure number had what exposure. This will test if your camera’s exposure settings are consistent. When you get your film back from the processor, compare your blue sky exposures to each other by holding them up together in front of a window. They should all have basically the same color blue. A tiny bit of variation is ok, though.

Your camera probably has some kind of exposure meter. It’s probably a needle or a series of tiny lights in the viewfinder. Checking the accuracy of that is a little tougher. As Padeye said, a medium tone in bright sunlight should meter f16 at 1/125 using 100 ASA film. A gray card is best, but grass is pretty close to medium.

You could also borrow a friend’s camera (which has an exposure meter, of course) and compare the reading that each camera takes of the same subject at the same time. Make sure that neither lens has a filter on it, both cameras are set for the same film speed, and no zoom lenses are mounted (most zoom lenses shift the effective aperture as they are zoomed. The camera’s meter accounts for this, making it not a problem in normal use but it will screw up the comparison test.) Both cameras should give the same reading, within 1/3 of a stop or so.

Yeah, I think people are on the right track, you have to test the shutter to see if it’s accurate enough to make the camera worth using. If the shutter is innacurate it will not be very useful for manual photography, where you want accurate exposure control.
The easiest way to evaluate the shutter is to take it to a used camera shop. They have a strobe gadget to measure focal plane shutter accuracy. Most used camera dealers don’t mind evaluating your camera, maybe even for free (act like you want to buy something)…

In addition to all the good advice here, take a good look at your lenses. Take the lens off the camera and open the aperture up all the way (lowest f-stop number). Look through it, from the back, at a decent light source. Check for dirt accumulation on the internal elements, and, most importantly, for mold growth. If you see thin weblike filaments inside, that’s mold, and it requires a professional to take the lens apart and clean it. It can actually etch into the elements and affect your images, so should be done as soon as possible. If it’s been stored for 10 years, especially in the humid South, this is quite likely.

The same thing can happen to the mirror. Don’t Attempt to Clean the Mirror! I was the repairs manager at a camera store for a few years, and that was always a sad scenario. You can knock it out of alignment and mess up your focusing, or just make it a real fuzzy pain to look through the viewfinder.

Is your camera an SRT 101? That’s a great camera to learn photography with. Not as easy as today’s cameras, but it’s got a rugged body in comparison, and you’ll learn more about basic photographic principles by using a manual camera.

You might want to check with your local camera store and see if there’s a camera club in your area. Chances are there are some members of the old school who would be glad to teach you the finer points of your manual camera in the Point-and-Shoot age.

Good luck to your roving eye!