The Praktica LTL and MTL series


The Praktica *TL series are pretty decent 35mm SLRs with TTL metering. They use the less common screw lens mount, but you can still find enough decent screw mount lenses in second-hand stores. The Praktica *TL are fitted with a 50mm Pentacon lens, which can focus from 33cm to infinity, a pretty wide range which is even usable for some things normally done with a macro lens. I've also got a Pentacon 28mm wide-angle and 80-200mm telephoto lenses. Pentacon is the name of the corresponding lens manufacturer. The Prakticas were manufactured in Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s (actually they're communist products!), so any Praktica you run into is probably some 20-25 years old! I use a cheap single-piece 3-diopter adapter lens to go with the telephoto lens to get reasonable macro shots, though colour aberration really shows in the corners, which could be remedied with a better adapter lens (or some digital correction!). I recently bought an extension tube, which enables the 50mm to be used as a macro lens. I'm still having my first film processed with this new combination.

I use the Cokin system for lens filters. I have a tungsten colour correction (A80) filter, an orange filter, and a linear polarisation filter. Of these, I found the polarisation filter the most useful. I found the quality of the colour filters a little suspect (but haven't checked this in detail), but the pola filter looks fine.

I bought all the stuff second-hand, and I found it's a very inexpensive way to get going in serious photography. Now, on to some details...

Calibrating the light meter of the MTL-3

I bought a spare MTL-3 body, but found that the light meter was about 4 stops off! I decided to try and calibrate it. I searched the internet but found no information about it, though several people asked for it. I'm not sure the LTL-3, MTL-5, and MTL-5b work the same way.

When you take off the bottom of the camera, you can see three pot meters. One is for the low light level/slow shutter time end, one for the high light level/fast shutter time end, and one seems to be a sort of `bias' which has a small but noticable effect on all light levels. (I will produce a diagram of the positions of the pot meters when I find the time!)

The camera can be calibrated with help of a camera with correctly-functioning TTL meter. Find a plain surface to measure light. Set the shutter of the GOOD camera to 1/500 or 1/1000s and set the aperture so that the light meter says the lighting is correct. Now set the BAD camera to the same setting, and tweak the high-end pot meter till the light meter shows the same reading as the good camera. Now do the same with a slow shutter speed (1/4 or 1/8s or so), but tweak using the low-end pot meter. When you go back to the 1/500 or 1/1000 situation, you find that the bad camera now gives a wrong reading, but probably less wrong than before. When you repeat this procedure, it's likely you'll eventually converge to a good calibration. You can check your final result by comparing the meter readings at all different shutter speeds.