I am blessed and cursed to own a large number of old film SLRs – and there’s one cheap camera accessory I want to praise as it has helped me keep them working more than anything else.
The reason I said ‘blessed and cursed’ is because while I love shooting film, and I love the smooth mechanical action of a proper old SLR – boy, do the things break.
I mean, you can hardly blame them. My beloved Pentax ME Super would have been manufactured somewhere between 1979 and 1984. For all I know, it photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even so, its mechanical parts are all still in perfect working order, and it shoots and winds on as well as it ever did. However, the one part that has failed is the electronic metering system.
The ME Super had an electronic meter that shows you green lights when you are correctly exposing, and red lights when you are not – and I say ‘had’ because mine no longer does. In my experience, it’s always the electronics that go. Many of my other SLRs are in a similar position – they’re in perfect working order in terms of their shutters and winding mechanisms, but they can’t meter worth a damn.
And unfortunately – as a nice man at CameraWorld explained to me in the soothing tones of a vet approaching a beloved family pet with a big syringe – it’s not really cost-effective to get them repaired. Often the cost of doing so is equivalent to or even higher than the cost of just getting another one second-hand.
But what if, like me, you don’t want to do that? You like your old camera, and you don’t like waste. If that’s the case then let me introduce you to the cheap accessory that saved my cameras from the scrapheap – the TTArtisan Hotshoe Light Meter.
Just as it sounds, it’s a light meter that slips onto your hotshoe. Point it in the same direction you’re shooting, plug in your settings, tap the button on the rear, and it’ll tell you if you’re over, under, or just right. And just like that, your beloved Pentax is alive again.
It’s not perfect, for sure. AP’s technical editor Andy Westlake described it as the meter for people who ‘can’t afford the Voigtlander’, which is true, though he didn’t need to rinse me like that. The TTArtisan meter’s dials are clickless and can be a little slippery, so you need to get into the habit of checking they haven’t moved out of position every time you take your camera out of your bag (especially the ISO dial. Trust me). The tiny jewellers screws that keep the battery and hotshoe mount in place are also very easy to lose – I ended up buying a massive pack of spares on Amazon.
Still, I can’t complain. This brilliant little bit of kit has given many of my SLRs a new lease on life. And what’s more, I’ve only got the first-generation version – and Andy tells me the updated Mark II has click-step dials. So, I think I know what’s going on my Christmas list…
The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Amateur Photographer magazine or Kelsey Media Limited. If you have an opinion you’d like to share on this topic, or any other photography related subject, email: [email protected].
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