Well, I’m starting to think this lens have some issues with its shutter. Second time in a couple days that it miss fires when I load it AND after that, the image is super overexposed, like really overexposed. It shouldn’t have been like this. I’ll do a better test just to be sure it is fine. I wouldn’t like to have it serviced :D, a copal shutters are no longer produced so you just need to rely on people with the knowledge to service them.
When the shutter misbehaves
This frame is really a note about a problem. Twice in a couple of days the lens misfired as I loaded it, and then the exposure came back badly overblown, far more light than the settings should have let through. That points at the shutter, not me, and on a large format lens the shutter is a separate mechanical unit built into the lens itself, not part of the camera body. When it starts firing at the wrong speed, every frame through that lens is suspect until it is fixed.
Why that is a real headache
The catch is that these shutters, the Copal units that most large format lenses were built around, are no longer manufactured. Production ended years ago, so there are no new ones to buy and no factory to send a bad one to. If a Copal drifts out of spec you are relying on the shrinking number of technicians who still know how to strip and service them by hand, and their time and their spare parts are both finite. A shutter that fires long is not a small thing either, at slow speeds a half stop of error is one problem, but a sticky blade that hangs open turns a one second exposure into who knows how long, which is exactly the blown out result I got here.
Testing before it matters
So the sensible move is what I said I would do, run the lens through a proper test at a range of speeds before I trust it on anything I cannot reshoot. It is tedious, firing frame after frame at measured intervals to catch an intermittent fault, but the alternative is hauling the 8×10 out to a scene that only exists once, in a light that will not come back, and finding out afterward that the shutter ate the frame. A vintage mechanical system gives you results nothing digital matches, and the price of that is this kind of maintenance and suspicion. I would rather lose a test sheet in the backyard than the real one in the field, so the lens goes on the bench before it goes back in the bag.
For the record, the scene itself was worth the trouble, a lone tree in fog, the kind of soft, low contrast subject that large format renders beautifully when everything is working. That is what makes an intermittent shutter fault so frustrating, the light was right and the composition was there, and the only thing standing between me and the frame was a mechanical part firing at the wrong speed. It is a good reminder that on this kind of gear the camera is only as reliable as its slowest, oldest component, and the fix is always the same, test it, know it, and do not trust it on anything that matters until you have.