John Farrell

The problem with oil is that it will migrate into the diaphragm blades. These should be dry - oil will stick them. Diaphragm rings can be lightly greased - but over time the oil component of the grease can migrate onto the blades...

If you go to the bottom of the site page, and select "Theme", you can turn off the side bar.

Words/No words.

As long as the 35mm lens is rangefinder coupled, the rangefinder will show correct focus. What you may need is an accessory viewfinder (which fits on the accessory shoe) to show the field of view of the 35mm lens.

Some sort of pub quiz, is it?

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It's good to see a thread about Prakticas resurrected...my only camera for many years was a Praktica LLC, which I bought new in 1973. The meter died after a few years, but I just used a handheld meter. I haven't used the LLC in the last few years, but it still works fine. I have, though, aquired another dozen or so L series Prakticas, of different models. Some, I have repaired. Two of the cameras had shutter cocking problems - one caused by battery leakage, and the other being worn out. Another had a shutter problem caused by grease on the mechanism; I cleaned the parts, and fixed it. There are some odd ideas about Praktica L cameras out there. One "critic" was complaining about plastic gears...I don't know where he found them, the only plastic gears I've found in these cameras are in the meter mechanism.

Zenit 3m - I traded it for a Praktica LLC in 1973. There is nothing wrong with the Praktica, and I have since bought another 3m, but it's not quite the same...

I currently have a monochrome film in a Contaflex 1 - I'd be interested to see what AI could do with that...

It looks like guests are posting spam as pictures.

I report them, too...but the tool is too slow for the blitz spammers. We need either a moderator on duty, or an expansion of the tools we can use.

It looks like the spammers don't work on Sunday.

Years ago, Photo-net had a spam problem like the current one. One evening, I opened a spammer's profile, to report them, and found I had a tab with moderator's tools - I could delete the spam and ban the spammer. I live in hope that something like this will appear here...

Is it possible to turn off the ability for new accounts to be made for a time period? The vulnerable time appears to be from around 0500 GMT for 6 or 7 hours.