The Common Pencil

Analog photography: My experience & adventures

What was I getting myself into? I knew next to nothing of how to operate this nearly completely mechanical thing! Yes, nearly. After closer examination, I found a battery compartment. But, why?

After reading the manual, I learned that a little button battery was used to power a light meter. However, the required type of battery was no longer available in this day and age, because it contained mercury. There were alternatives, like getting a battery converter for modern batteries, or soldering, or finding the only brand of batteries in this entire world that produces the one and only true alternative for the old mercury batteries: WeinCell.

Nerd depth
A simple solution would be to use hearing-aid batteries that are a little too high of voltage. Those might lead to inaccurate light-metering. Not only that, the amount of inaccurate they are will vary depending on the stage of battery depletion. Mercury batteries were very stable in the amount of voltage they gave throughout their life-span. Our modern day alkaline button batteries seem to give their most in the beginning, and then slowly die. Meaning that the light meter will happily tell you that things are overexposed in the beginning, and underexposed at the end of the battery’s life. But hey, at least they’re cheap!  

Soldering inside the battery compartment did not strike me as a good plan. Especially since I am the one doing the soldering. No, the only sensible option was getting the ‘real’ alternative, a WeinCell. Even though this battery seemed impossible to find in Norway, and the prices became a little silly, I found it online and ordered the little thingy. My analog adventures shall not be stopped by a lack of power!  

In case you were wondering: Yes, there still was an old, corroded mercury battery inside the camera. Luckily it had not dirtied the battery compartment itself. I removed it safely. It did raise the question: Will the light meter even work?

You’ve just read part 2 of my new blog series: Analog Adventures with the Chinon CX II. Let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment, or by sending an e-mail to heleen@commonpencil.com. Thank you for reading!