Milsurp After Hours

A week or so ago I started trimming my excess trumpet collection on ebay. Since I sold three of them I started looking at the cameras again. I bought a Pentax ME that came with some flotsam and jetsam that included a pentax ME power winder that actually works when loaded with six penlight batteries. Only one lense came with it, and a 2x converter, but it was the Pentax 50mm with the 1.7. That's a really good fast Pentax lense. I've got several K mount Pentax lenses that will work with it as well.

The ME was made back in about 1976 and is aperture priority. You set the aperture and manually focus and the camera selects the film speed from about 1/8 second up to 1000. The selected speed lights up in the view window. If your aperture selection isn't possible for light conditions it will show an over or under and you just open up your lens to find a speed that will work.

This one works. Put in a couple of LR44 batteries..that are still pretty common and I was good to go.

Then the trouble started. I Didn't have the film leader sufficiently locked into the winding spool when loading. After it occurred to me that the film wasn't advancing I rewound it a half turn to check resistance, in case it was actually advancing, and opened the back. This was a dumb thing to do.. the leader went into the tin cassette. But.. there was a solution. I got a reloadable cartridge with another camera I bought. I got out the darkroom bag and went to work on what I had never done before. Long story short, I managed to open the locked film cartridge and make the transfer. There were some problems because I hadn't done it before...but this story is going to be long enough as it is without getting into that.

Then the resumed photo taking went smoothly this time. However, in rewinding the end of the film came out of the canister and when I opened the back the film was still on the take up reel and hadn't been rewound into the light tight canister and was exposed.

In any case only about a third of the shots were ruined. I got enough evidence to show me this camera still works. Even tried a few flash photos at the 100x sink that came out.

I got an ME super coming in the mail. The Super was the next step up from the ME.

My first decent SLR was a ME Super and it did pretty much the same thing to me.
Being a tightwad, I discovered that you could usually squeeze an extra frame or two out of the end of a roll of film. I did this on a vacation through Canada and when it was time to rewind, it just didn't feel right. I figured I had pulled the film off of the rewind spool trying for the extra frames.
I took it into a shop and had them open it in a dark bag to see if they could salvage anything.
The clerk came out and said there was no problem, everything was already rewound. Turns out I never got the film hooked up to the winding spool in the first place.....

My wife was the chief financial officer for a company that had offices in a half dozen states years and years ago. Her boss had a company function once to celebrate how good things were going, all expenses paid, for a couple of days at a sea side resort. At the time I was all enthused with film photography.... there wasn't any other kind. Computers were giant things with hard disks as big as garbage can lids and nobody imagined digital photography. I volunteer to be the event photographer. I had a Pentax K1000 and I took all kinds of photos. Photos of all sorts of "important" moments. The film hadn't advanced as I was thinking it was during an entire roll worth of shots. I had nothing when the event was all over except for what was taken with an under water camera I tried out in the pool. Talk about embarrassed. I still blush when I think about it even though the company went out of business years ago and the "boss" has been dead for at least a dozen years.

The ME Super was crap. The seller, when I said I wanted to send it back, gave me my money back and told me to "destroy" it. Saved me the sending it back expense. Good guy. He should have known it was crap when he offered it....but he did right when pressed.

I spun the wheel and went for another pig in a poke. I'll attach a photo of the yet to be seen as taken from the ebay offer.