Re-visiting an old friend....

         

I resurrected the Emi K 35mm Viewfinder camera that I used for a High School Assignment when I was 18.

It appeared to be fully functional; shutter worked well on all apertures, all dials turned without getting stuck. It was very clean for having sat in a cupboard of my childhood home for the last 38 years!

I put a Kodak Ektar 100 in and took it out for a test run.

It started off really well. I decided to shoot using Sunny 16; I didn't want to bother with a light meter and keep changing settings.  I figured that this would allow me to leave the settings as they were and just see how the camera acted.

At about the 18th frame, the wind on began to get difficult. I noted that when winding on to the next frame, the rewind knob didn't turn as fully as I thought it should.  When it wouldn't wind on any further I decided to call it quits but, I couldn't rewind back into the film cassette either!

I took the camera into my lab and they took out the film in the darkroom. It seemed that the film hadn't been advancing properly and had scrunched up inside the camera. The film had also come out with some lines straight across it but, it is possible that this has occurred inside the camera as a result of the 'film scrunching'.

After some testing I found that the wind on lever went all the way as it should but the mechanism inside the camera was slipping and not making the full turn to bring the next frame in. This meant an eventual frame overlap and somehow the film ended up scrunching up inside the camera.

As you can see, the frames that Marianne from Pro-Am Colour Laboratories rescued and scanned still look pretty good! I'm a bit disappointed but still not sure if I will retire the camera for good. If I can fix this problem with the wind on slippage inside the camera, then I have a very neat little 35mm camera that will still give me some enjoyment. We'll see what happens.

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