How Leica Measured Shutter Speeds to the Millisecond with the Bare Eye
Alabama-based photographer and engineer Destin Sandin of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay just lately visited KameraStore in Finland. Sandin, whose movies ship in-depth technical data in an entertaining and comprehensible means, realized about Kamerastore’s specialised restoration and testing course of, which incorporates utilizing period-appropriate equipment.
Past repairing and testing cameras, Kamerastore affords the world’s solely digicam mechanics coaching program and technician coaching faculty. It’s dwelling to gear and machines that may excite any images fanatic, particularly one as within the technical points as Sandin.
Sandin’s newest video goes behind the scenes at Kamerastore, together with a take a look at a really particular Leica testing machine from the Thirties. The gadget permits a skilled technician, like Ari at Kamerastore, to calibrate an outdated Leica curtain-type focal aircraft digicam shutter. The machine depends upon a rolling shutter-like impact that enables a skilled technician to calibrate a shutter by eye.
Leica’s first commercially out there 35mm digicam, the Leica 1(A), hit retailer cabinets in 1925. It, and later Leica cameras, had been among the many greatest available on the market. Like many later cameras, early Leica fashions included a shutter velocity dial on high. This mechanical dial allowed the photographer to pick out a shutter velocity, like 1/1,000 second, for instance. The shutter velocity dial have to be exactly calibrated to the precise velocity of the shutter.
If the photographer selects the 1/1,000 second shutter velocity, meaning the shutter is open and the movie is uncovered to gentle for only one millisecond. Leica engineers wanted to tune its cameras to make sure that the shutter was open for the anticipated length, with excessive precision. That’s the place the particular calibration machine Sandin noticed in Finland is available in.
The machine measures a millisecond mechanically. Accompanying the machine is an authentic Leica restore handbook — in German, after all — that features diagrams exhibiting exactly what the shutter ought to appear to be by the machine at totally different shutter speeds. At numerous rotational charges, a correctly-calibrated shutter will produce differently-curved traces.
Not glad to go away such cool expertise behind in Finland, upon his return to the U.S., Sandin recreated the unbelievable machine utilizing a drill, ketchup bottle, and magic marker. Mixed with a phantom high-speed digicam and very vivid Nanolux gentle that doesn’t flicker, Sandin can use the high-speed digicam to view traces on the ketchup bottle because it spins behind the digicam on a drill.
Utilizing an additive animation method, it’s potential to see the curved traces like what was seen utilizing the devoted Leica machine. Whereas a ketchup bottle with marker traces could seem crude, Sandin’s setup is refined. Leica technicians carried out these measurements with a single machine and the bare eye. Kamerastore’s expert technicians nonetheless do.
One other piece of the puzzle is making certain that the machine’s rotation, or ketchup bottle in Sandin’s case, matches up with a typical velocity. In any other case, the achieved shutter velocity measurements could also be incorrect. The Leica machine makes use of aliasing, very like a file participant, to permit the consumer to dial in a exact benchmark velocity. It’s an unbelievable machine.
Picture credit: SmarterEveryDay, Kamerastore