How to work an ilford sportoman?

I have my great grandfathers camera - an ilford sportoman 45mm -
I have never used a manual camera and i was wondering how i can get it started, and what all the number by the lens do?
Any tips?? thanks!

you guys have been a great help so far..

Is this what you mean by meter.. anf if so is this a good one?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sekonic-Auto-L-158-L...

Ok, so I just did a search and found that that camera is a 35mm camera (probably with a 45mm lens if 45mm is printed somewhere on the camera) and you have apertures of f/2.2 to f/22 and shutter speeds of B, 30, 60, 125 and 250. The speeds are fractions (30=1/30th of a second) and B means Bulb (stays open as long as you hold the shutter release) Theres no light meter which will make it trickier but it's not rocket science. You will however need to figure out exposure yourself. Heres a very lengthy article about that http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm

If you have another camera with a meter or an acutal light meter you can use that of course. The meter readings will give you the same exposure regardless of camera. i.e. a digital camera says that f/4.0@1/125th@100ISO is properly exposed for it, then that will be a proper exposure for your sportoman as well. Digital cameras will give 1/2 or 1/3 stops so you will have to round up or down as your sportoman is only full stops, just get it close and you'll be ok. I would round up but that's just me.

ISO by the way is film speed.

EDIT: I wouldnt buy that particular meter. The one thing you want to avoid is Selenium meters. They use the the available light to power the meter. When the selenium starts to decay the meter is thrown off. I would tell you to get a meter that uses batteries instead, they will cost more but are usually a better quality. Selenium meters havent been made in ages so they are all old already.

While I'm not familiar with that camera in particular, I do use fully manual cameras pretty regularly. You'll need a light meter to be really accurate until you just develop an eye for things. You don't need a fancy, expensive meter. I bought an old Weston meter off of eBay for $10 and it works great.

The numbers on lens correspond to f/stops and shutter speeds. This two things working together determine exposure, or how much light is allowed to hit the film while the shutter is open. The meter will tell you how to set these things. In general, control exposure with a combination of these settings, but control depth of field, or the amount of sharpness in front of and behind your subject. f/stops are also counter-intuitive. They relate to the size of the opening in the lens. Small f/stop numbers represent larger openings than higher f/stop numbers. Small f/stops generally result in shallow depth of field and larger f/stops result in more depth of field.

If you use the camera outdoors on a sunny day, one rule of thumb is the "sunny sixteen" rule. Set the f/stop to f/16 and the shutter speed to the recipriocal of your film speed. For instance if you are using 200 speed film, you'd set the shutter speed to 1/200. You can make adjustment to this combo. If you change the f/stop to f/8, you would increase the shutter speed to 1/400. This would result in the same exposure, but with less depth of field, though at f/8, you'd still have a fairly large depth of field. I'm not sure what the fastest shutterspeed on this camera would be, but that would be your upper limit for making these types of adjustments.

Indoors, your meter becomes more critical, as will a tripod. Normally slower shutter speeds are used indoors and you can get blurry photos from your hands shaking while the shutter is open.