For those of you who can not wait to see who is behind all these extremely useful e-mails, I am happy to have found the Avatar Way of showing myself! Pretty, or what?
(What I am doing here? making a testfilm to check my K3, after I did a fix, clean and lube job on it. Yes, it makes pretty good footage. And my internal light meter is off half a stop. I can live with that).
My lightmeter is also half a stop off, but I always assumed that was because of the lightloss of the lens or the prism or whatever's in there. (Frankly I don't care what's in there as long as i works. I can't do shit with it anyway)
You see me leaning on a Zenith Krasnogorsk-3, aka K-3, which I bought a while ago at a filmers trade fair for USD 125,=, new and complete kit with bag, filters etc. The only thing was, it was very persistant in running at max. frame speed. So, I opened it anyway for modifying the loop formers, so I decided to give it a go and opened up some more. They are very easy to work on. Proved to be the speed governor having lost a small circlip which was luckily buried in a dot of grease. Fixing the clip fixed the governor! The rest was a mere clean and lube job. And the loop formers. And now, we have shot our first real movie with it. If the images are as good as the testfilm images, we have a start!
Just Curious, in which direction are your lightmeters off? 1/2 a stop too open or too shut? I just got one myself and I'm using a watch battery adaptor from NCS (http://www.k3camera.com) which seems to work great, but I haven't gotten back any footage yet. I'd like to do a test with different settings.
Thanks, Daniel
You are right, I should have included the answer to your question. It is half a stop more open, so 8 by ext. meter becomes 5.6+1/2 in real life. Which is not something the modern stocks can not handle, but my testclip shows a slightly better image when you do +half a stop. Somebody posted that the reflex system eats light and so a comparison with an external meter is difficult. Yes, in principle this is true. However, I did my homework here and compared/noted meter readings both external and internal with gray scale test images and found out that in real life my long serving external meter compared to the built in meter results in this error of "only" plus half a stop.
I also made a testclip from my son throwing paper planes, fast camera work is then required and for this I simply used the internal metering system. The footage came out fine, see stock latitude remark.
From your small photo the K3 does look like the Arriflex BL. Glad you managed to get the problem fixed with the governor. I prefer mechanical cameras more rather then the modern ones welded with plastic parts and modern electronics, because you can always get them fixed easily. I remember my old friend who owns a K3, he showed me some footage that he shot projected on the big screen, it was an amazing experience.
