When a Good Camera Goes Bad

You try to be a good parent. You set rules and you are there for them whenever they need you. You raise them right and give them second chances. You praise them when they do well. But even then, even after all you have done, sometimes a good one goes bad. And it hurts.

No, I'm not talking about your kids (at least I hope I'm not!) I'm talking about your cameras. The good ones - the ones you thought were safe from turning to the dark side. You've done all you thought you could as an owner, but the day comes when you look at the negatives and it hits you:  This good camera has gone bad. And like I said, as you stare unbelievingly at those hopeless negatives, it hurts. It really hurts.

Ok, so maybe I'm being a little dramatic here. but believe me, you might feel somewhat like this if the negatives your are staring at are negatives from an all-important once-in-a-lifetime family vacation that you thought was getting documented. What's even worse is that you chose to use your vintage film camera because "it's a great camera, and the photos it will make will be more meaningful than what your iPhone can ever do."Yeah, I said that, too. It actually happened to me recently. A good camera went bad.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that my wife, Debbie, and I set out on our much-anticipated road trip west toward Denver, Colorado, where my oldest daughter and her partner live. My younger daughter and her partner, who live in Seattle, were flying in to join us there. Rather than get to Denver as quickly as possible, we decided to take our time, stay off the interstate, and camp along the way. Our route included some places we had always wanted to see, including Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee, the Oklahoma City Memorial, and Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. Of course, I carefully selected cameras for this trip, and I decided to go all Minolta with my X-700 and XD-7 SLR's and my 7s rangefinder. The first camera up was my X-700 loaded with Kodak Gold 200. I really like this camera, as it has a very accurate meter and fits well in my hand. It's the very definition of a good camera.

My beloved X-700

What I could not know at the time but would learn later when I viewed the developed negatives, was that it had gone bad - really bad, as you can see here.

Almost half of the frames I shot on two of the three rolls of Kodak Gold 200 I shot in it had the tell-tale signs of a shutter problem. I grabbed the camera, took the lens off, opened the back, and fired the shutter. I could see clearly the shutter lag myself, and I quickly noticed that it only happened at 1/1000 sec. Remembering that I had shot many of these photos in manual mode while using the Sunny f16 rule, I went back to the negatives and saw that, sure enough, nearly all the shots that were made at f8 and 1/1000 sec were affected. Fortunately, it wan't a total disaster, as other shots were fine. Nevertheless, this is exactly what you do not want to happen on an important photography assignment, project, or vacation.

Reelfoot Lake at Sunset. No shutter problem here.

After posting some details and some photos online, some very helpful fellow film photographers shared their experiences with the same problem and that it can be fixed with proper adjustment. In fact, a very nice photography friend quickly offered to fix it for me. Hopefully, I'll have a working X-700 back in the fold. But I have learned a couple of lessons thought this experience. First, things can go wrong. Cameras or film can fail, and they do not care how important the moments you are trying to capture are. When it is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, don't hesitate to go digital. Second, our vintage film cameras are . . . vintage. They're old! And as such, they will need servicing. While it may cost more money than you originally paid for your vintage film camera, a good CLA (clean-lubricate-adjust) may go a long way toward preventing problems that could lead to losing precious photographs. I like to think of myself as a caretaker for the cameras I own. Proper maintenance can keep a good camera from going bad.