I’m constanty trolling Facebook Marketplace for deals on vintage photo gear. I recently came across an ad for a non-working Canon Canonet QL 17 Rangefinder. I did a little research and learned that this model was introduced in 1969. It has a sharp lens that photographers seem to like. I reached out to the seller who told me she had a buyer lined up but would let me know if anything changed. Later in the day she contacted me when that sale fell through.

We met up in a shopping center parking lot. “What happened with your other buyer?” I asked. She said after looking at it he decided he wasn’t interested. This would help in my negotiations. The fact that her ad was two weeks old and it hadn’t yet sold would also work in my favor. She’d already disclosed in her ad that the camera wasn’t working. Sometimes folks with old cameras but little knowlede about them think they don’t work when they actually do. But in this case, she was right. Shutter wouldn’t fire. Aperature ring was stuck. “I’m interested in trying to get it working but I couldn’t give you more than $15 or $20,” I told her. She quickly agreed to the lower amount.

I’m a true novice when it comes to camera repair and cleaning and felt like I was in way over my head.

Over the next few weeks I worked on getting the camera to be functional. It wasn’t until I tore it apart that I discovered there was green battery corrosion all over the innards. It was in sad shape. I’m a true novice when it comes to camera repair and cleaning and felt like I was in way over my head. I was glad I hadn’t spent more than the cost of a lunch out on this thing.

I YouTube’d the heck out of it and checked all the online resources. Try as I might I couldn’t get the shutter to fire. But this camera is equipped with a fast f/1.7 lens and I was really motiviated to get it to be usable. I kept at it and eventually got it working. Finally, the aperature and shutter both appeared to be working just fine. The green battery gunk was cleaned up although the camera’s light meter was still not working. No worries, most of my cameras don’t even have light meters anyway. It’s easy to use Sunny 16, an app on my phone or an independent light meter.

To deal with the light meter issue, I’d recently purchased a Doomo Meter D shoe-mounted light meter. It’s designed specifically for vintage cameras that don’t have a working meter (or not even equipped with one). I put it on the Canonet for a trial run.

I loaded a roll of black and white and spent the next week or so using up the 36 exposures. Unconfident in my repairs, I kept waiting for the shutter to stop working, but it kept plugging right along. A day trip to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve made it easy to quickly finish the roll.

I developed the roll of Ilford HP5+ 400 in Kodak D-76 1:1 at 68° for 13 minutes. When I pulled the film out of its final bath I could see that the film turned out. I was super excited to see that the camera was working properly.

Three shots from that roll are below. The structures in these photos are three different buildings.