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A customer told me my shutter speeds were off, so I finally bought a tester
I was fixing a Pentax K1000 for a guy near Portland last spring, and he brought it back saying his negatives looked underexposed. I brushed it off at first (you know how customers can be), but he showed me side by side shots with a different camera. Turns out my mechanical shutter was dragging by almost a full stop at 1/500. I had been trusting my ear for years to gauge speeds, that's how my mentor taught me. So I broke down and bought a used shutter tester off eBay for about $90. After I ran some tests on my bench, I found three other cameras I had serviced were all a little off. Now I run every mechanical body through that tester before I hand it back. Has anyone else had to unlearn a bad habit from their early days in this trade?
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wood.eric1mo ago
Man, @jana_shah that's wild to think about. The_lisa's got a point about learning by ear, but I can't imagine trusting my ears to catch a full stop difference at 1/500 on a Pentax. A tester for 90 bucks sounds like a solid investment to me if it catches problems even good listening skills might miss.
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the_lisa1mo ago
Honestly, I get why you’d say that, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a bad habit. My mentor taught me to listen to the shutter because he didn’t have a fancy tester back in the 70s. He could hear if a camera was off by half a stop just from the sound. That skill saved me a lot of time over the years when I didn’t have access to the right tools. It’s like training your ear for a guitar string being in tune. Sure, a tester is better now, but that wasn’t a bad habit, it was just what we had to do.
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