A Saturday with my Canonet

With today being the first day of my first real two-day weekend in a matter of months, I was anxious to work on some kind of project. James and I have been recording a complete cover album of Waylon Jennings' Honky Tonk Heroes, and we're currently laying down tracks for "Omaha". I thought I might work on that, but Ryan and I were talking about cameras while getting lunch, so I decided to try and solve a question I've been thinking about for a while: will my trusty Canon Canonet co-operate with a battery and have a working meter?



(The Canon Canonet QL17, as photographed hung on a dusty door and with my finger covering the flash on the Kodak.)

My Canonet is quite precious to me, as I've explained before. If the top shutter speed ran to 1/1000 (and not just 1/500) and the body had interchangeable lenses, I would probably consider it perfect. As it were, though, it comes very close to perfect just as it is. Small, comfy, solid, reliable - these are all words that you want attached to a camera. The Canonet is all of these.
But alas, my Canonet has never been exactly perfect. The 1/4 shutter speed generally sticks open, the vertical part of the rangefinder was mis-aligned, a 25-year-old battery was in the battery compartment when I bought it (and had oozed battery acid all in the battery cavity), and the viewfinder was cloudy. If I had spent serious money on the camera, I might have been ticked off, but since I got a great deal on it, I was willing to put a little work into it to make it great again.
Of course the light seals were done for - I replaced those right after I got it, which wasn't a hard job at all. But, I let sleeping dogs lie and used the camera as it was for a very long time. The horizontal calibration of the rangefinder was fine, and the shutter speeds were very much on time, so why let it sit?



(Brush Street, at Kennedy Boulevard, downtown Tampa - something like f/11 at 1/500)

Another good thing about the Canonet is that, even though it has a built-in meter and an aperture-priority mode, it is also gives you the option of going completely manual. My Canonet was in no shape to take a battery when I got it, so to take advantage of the sharp lens and smooth action, I was stuck with setting the shutter speed and aperture myself. That's right, the light meter was me. And I didn't really care. In fact, I still don't.



(This was taken f/8 at 1/250. How do I know that? 'Cause I set it there!)

Once you learn the sunny f/16 rule, and learn the extremely rudimentary rules for exposure compensation, it's a simple matter of multiplying or dividing to get the right exposure. Yet, I read about a lot of photographers who don't know how to expose manually, or don't even want to know. Ah well - when my batteries go out, I'll still be taking pictures.

Anyway, back to the main subject. I was simply curious to see if my Canonet's meter would even work. I don't even use it, so it wasn't going to be a matter of heartbreak if it didn't. Since you can make cheap hearing-aid batteries work in the Canonet, I thought it'd be neat to see it come to life. However, the leaky battery that had a nice home in the battery compartment for years had rusted out the battery contact. I set to work with the Q-Tips and alcohol, and when that scrubbing didn't work, popped off the bottom plate. Sadly, I didn't get a picture of that - you might have seen my face lit up in amazement, as I've never broken into a camera before. The Canonet's guts are a work of art - chock-full of little springs and levers. It was great to ogle at for a second.

Either way, I took out the battery compartment and still had no luck getting the battery contact clean. I might have tried to use lighter fluid as a cleaning solution on the contact, but I didn't feel like it. I don't need a working meter. Why trouble myself too much to get it to work? Even after putting the bottom plate back on, I wasn't satisfied in my exploration. I decided to go ahead and fix some of the problems that had annoyed me - the cloudy viewfinder, and the out-of-whack rangefinder. And to do this, I had to go where I had never gone before - the final frontier - under the top plate.



(Canonet with top plate off, and protection plate pried off the top of the rangefinder housing - three different views)

The top plate was very simple to take off - it's only held on by three screws, the rewind knob, and the film advance lever. The latter two screw out very easily... just don't close the back door with the rewind knob off the of the camera. You'll have no way of opening it, save getting a paperclip and digging around in there to release the catch. Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

Cleaning the viewfinder does so much for the camera. What you thought was a pretty good finder is turned into a FUCKING GREAT finder when you clean it. I didn't touch the inner glass at all, just scrubbed the pieces of glass attached to the top plate, inside and out, with Windex dripped onto the end of a Q-Tip. The most dirt is on the outside of the rear viewfinder window, from years and years of skin cells and facial oils getting rubbed on it. You never knew that your viewfinder wasn't stained brown from the factory. It's a thing of beauty, people.



(I didn't get a "before" picture, but this is what your Canonet's viewfinder should look like, in theory. If not, you're cheating yourself.)

So, after that, I adjusted the rangefinder, both horizontally and vertically. The vertical was a cinch, but I found out that even the horizontal was out of alignment. So, I adjusted it to infinity. And, when I get my test roll developed, hopefully my adjustments will have been right. Hmm.

Otherwise, el Canonet is still running smoothly. The 1/4 shutter speed still sticks open about half the time, but I never use it, so it's a low-priority worry.
Can't wait to go out and shoot a good roll in it - test roll first, though.