Cable Release F? Who needs it.....

[Bob Keefer]

Suddenly needing to remotely trigger my PZ-20 from about 15 feet away for a series of photos this weekend, I called the local camera store this morning and was told the Pentax Cable Release F was a mere $50.   For a switch?   So here's what I did: In the absence of any plug I could find around the house that remotely resembled the Pentax release socket, I took a length of two-strand speaker wire, stripped insulation from the ends, and wrapped one end of each strand around a smallish piece of aluminum foil, so it formed a ball about the size of a matchhead on the end of each wire.   Then I stuffed the foil balls into the release socket, one each next to the middle and top contacts on the camera. A strip of black electrician's tape held it all in place.   For firing, I first wrapped the other ends of the speaker wire around the twin prongs of a household extension cord, and plugged an HH-PC flash cord into the other end. The theory was I could plug the PC end of the cord into my flash meter and trigger the camera by hitting the cord-flash-meter button.   This Rube Goldberg solution actually worked, although intermittently; I suspect by the time the camera trigger voltage made its way through all that wire, it was able to be stymied by any contact corrosion or lack of alignment. Eventually I gave up on the flash meter and triggered the camera by shorting across the PC connector with a car key, which worked just fine.   Inelegant, perhaps, but very effective. And dead cheap. I shot two rolls and didn't waste $50 on photo price gouging.   (By the way, this apparently only triggers the shutter, so you need to set focus and exposure manually...The third contact seems to do AE and AF.)