Evan Grove explains how he built a shutter speed tester for photography equipment.
When it comes to maintaining a mechanical camera, mechanical shutters are one of the trickiest aspects of maintenance. These precise, fast-moving mechanisms rely on springs and ratchets to work properly. Over time, the springs stretch and the lubricants that keep everything moving smoothly become sticky and dirty.
To make the necessary adjustments for mechanical shutters, the shutter speed must be known somehow. These shutters are Really But you need to be quick. A stopwatch won't do you any good here, and neither will your phone's camera. Neither are fast enough to check a shutter that's only open for a few milliseconds. Commercial shutter-testing devices are available, but they're usually professional and quite expensive. So let's make one ourselves.
A stiff solid-core wire holds the two LEDs in a fixed position behind the camera's shutter. You can bend the wire to get the LEDs to line up properly for different camera models. You can also adjust the wire to test different areas of the shutter, but I found this to be much more tricky. When the LEDs were at the edge of the shutter, the IR photodiode did not pick up the IR light. To solve this, I attached some aluminum foil to the lens cap to reflect the light back towards the photodiode. I didn't think this would work, but it did.
Check out this post for more details.
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