I'm impatient. There I've said it.
Its taken me until I'm in my mid to late 40’s that I've finally 'learned' to chill. Whilst I'm pondering this month's blog post, I have a live example of this.
I have a generally hectic day job, in fact manic. So as I've mentioned previously, street photography and film photography is my chill, to zen proportions.
It generally unwinds the stress of Monday to Friday, using the creative side of my brain, rather than counting numbers and managing risk in the financial services.
I had to send the Leica M4P in for a service. I can totally understand that some folk will file this under ‘first world problems’. But the camera has never been right since I got it.
The issue was a uniformed light leak down the right hand side of the negative, which varied, depending on the shutter speed. I ignored this for 6 months, cropping the issue out of the camera, but finally decided that this was madness.
After taking in some research for 3 weeks, I elected to use Camserve. Based on the positive feedback / reviews on a Leica forum. My experience with Steve at Camserve, was world class service, no doubt about it. Initially on the phone, he mentioned that it could be one of two problems, the first he could fix, which he hoped was the second shutter requiring adjusting, by dismantling the camera, and giving it a thorough CLA (clean, lubricate and adjust), the second, he couldn’t fix and would be very expensive and would need to be sent to ‘a specialist’. I cant remember what the second issue was, as I stopped listening after he said ‘very expensive’.
When I dropped the camera off, I asked if he could take a photo of the camera, with its guts hanging out, not to authenticate that any work was completed, but just to see my baby dismantled, I know, I’m weird like that……..
Thankfully the issue was the former easy fix, not the ‘very expensive’ option.
It took three weeks all in all to resolve and a charge of £144. Exceptional value, full CLA, shutter reset, rangefinder reset. I also received a call each week, with an update. This compared to some stories online of other repairers taking between 3 - 12 months!!.
What was a concern, was that when I collected the camera, I was told it had been opened up by a novice (read seller), who had attempted to clear fungus of the inside of the viewfinder. When they reassembled the camera, they didn’t have a high attention to detail, with a lot of loose screws within the body of the mechanism.
I had noticed this prior to the CLA, the nut on the top of the film winder, kept coming loose.
This has now changed my mind about buying expensive film cameras from Japan, as the import tax and service costs, take out the initial benefit of buying from this market place.
I had put my first expensive of buying my Pentax 67, down to bad luck, but alas, it doesn’t seem to be the case.
I took the camera out on Saturday with a roll of kodak colour plus 200 loaded. I found that my muscle memory had gone, which was expected really. I did find the camera to be a completely different user experience, the winder mechanism was nice and tight, but also I found that I didn’t miss any exposures.
Here’s a couple of images:
It’s nice to have the old lady back in hand, as I was using the digital camera quite a bit, but I missed the slower process of setting up each shot.
Well thats me for another month, until next time, keep snapping.