Adventures in Film Photography

 My repair of the meter coupling on the Nikon EM seemed a success, so time for a test.

 I mounted the 50/1.8 Series E lens and loaded the camera with a roll of Arista 200. As sometimes happens I did not get the tongue of the film into the take-up spool quite right, so I gave the rewind knob a couple turns back and opened the camera back to try again.  I then saw that I had rolled the film leader completely back into the cassette.  I threw the film with disgust into the trash -- only to retrieve it seconds later as I remembered that I had a reloadable cassette to which the film could be transferred.  I put everything into the dark bag, pried open the Arista cassette and had the reel and film in the reloadable cassette in  a couple minutes.

I carried the Nikon EM around for about a week to finish the test roll and the meter worked smoothly as expected under a variety of conditions.  I finished off the roll with a couple shots around the house and then proceeded to crank the rewind knob to get the film back in the cartridge.  The plastic rewind knob cracked in half on the first turn.
 

The whole thing went back into the black bag so I could fish out the exposed film and get it into the Paterson tank for processing.  As I expected, all the images looked to be properly exposed.

This through-the-window shot was made with a Vivitar 70-210 f/3.5 Macro Focusing Zoom

 
The prospects for repair of the rewind knob looked dim.  In a search on the web I found that a broken rewind knob on the EM is not an uncommon problem. Replacements are available on ebay, but they are generally priced higher than what I paid for the camera. The same knob is on several Nikon models, so perhaps something will turn up to get the camera back into operation. I hope so, as I like the light-weight and compact Nikon and its little Series E lens.