Minolta Moments

Oh dear. It appears I need to start this post with that most terrible of journal crimes - an apology for a long gap in posting. I finally went back to full-time work in February after a long break (filled with photography... the break that is, not, alas, the job) and have been meaning to post ever since. Ooops. But never fear - I haven't stopped shooting and have plenty to catch you up on. :)

I've previously mentioned a Minolta SLR I used back before time began (well, in the early 90's) and I finally found prints of the shots I took back then, including on a three week odyssey to Western Australia. I don't even know what model Minolta it was, or the lens specs, except that I had some kind of zoom (with horrendous vignetting out wide) and a 200mm telephoto. Oh, and that the light meter was not integrated, but instead sat on top near the shutter trigger and could even be removed from the camera.

So I scanned those shots and found some stuff I actually quite liked. Seems this latent photographer really has been with me a while, even if he wasn't paying attention to camera models, shutter speeds and f-stops. Here's an example (it's the Eucla station of the Overland Telegraph, which used to be Australia's only wired communications link!), with most of the vignette cropped out:



Now I've been after my father for a while to find that camera so I can satisfy my need to know its specs and also to do some modern day shooting with it. Meanwhile I saw an 85-300mm macro zoom go buy on eBay and thought I'd grab it for when I did find the other camera. It went for $18! Of course, I couldn't let it sit on the shelf and just had to try it out, so I managed to buy a Minolta X-300 for the princely sum of... $10. So for $28 (plus shipping) I had a nice little Minolta rig from circa 1985. When I put it together, I noticed that the zoom had a "macro" feature, which is a word that has disappointed me in the past, but in this case is justified. At 300mm you can pull down the zoom ring to get from between 1:10 and 1:2 magnification at quite short distances. I just had to go shooting... 2 x SR76 batteries, my now-traditional 24 exposure Kodak Ultramax 400 ISO test film and off I went.



So that's a macro shot, although it's not immediately obvious if you don't know what I was shooting. But trust me, it's not something you can do with your average 85-300mm telehoto. I quite like this camera. It's uncomplicated but very functional - you can simply set the shutter to auto, set the aperture you want (manually of course, noting the selected shutter speed in passing) and go (oh, and focus... it is a manual focus deal). The shutter has a satisfyingly smooth click which I love. Plus it appears to take halfway decent photos...



I won't be using this camera full-time, but it's certainly not going to sit idle. I really enjoy using some of this old kit - I love my EOS 3 (and there's another story) but there's something satisfying about getting great photos with cameras that most people would leave to gather dust.