I took a bike ride down Old Town Road one sunny day recently. I was riding along enjoying the passing scenery when suddenly a wind gust or a bump in the road caused my bike to veer sharply left into a driveway. I found myself suddenly in the middle of a yard sale. Then, as if by magic, I was peering into an old camera bag containing a Minolta X-700 single lens reflex. The camera still had an inspection sticker on the top deck, and it looked like it had not seen more than a couple rolls of film. While the seller demonstrated the camera's operation he came down five bucks on the price with no prompting from me. At that point, of course, there was no choice available other than to fork over a twenty.
Besides the camera, the bag contained an interesting accessory I had not encountered before, a Vivitar 2X Macro Focusing Teleconverter. With the prime lens and the converter set to the infinity positions, the result is a doubling of the focal length to 100 mm and continuous focal adjustment from close-up to infinity. By adjusting the converter, however, one is able to focus down to a few inches with a 1 to 1 correspondence of image to subject size.
The continuously wide focal range of the teleconverter provides a lot of versatility in shooting. As with all such accessories, however, there is a two-stop aperture or speed penalty, and a corresponding reduction in depth of focus. That means that hand-held shots are really only feasible in bright light conditions. While the camera's aperture priority auto-exposure features made the use of the teleconverter pretty transparent, you do have to pay attention to the shutter speed that is being selected as well being attentive to the very narrow depth of field with ultra-closeups. In practice, I found these restrictions to be less a problem and more of an opportunity to see my subjects in unaccustomed ways.
I used up a roll of Kodak Gold 200 shooting the Minolta with the Teleconverter at the Botanic Garden. Since I had not carried along a tripod I did not make full use of the extreme close-up capability of the teleconverter, but I was pleased with the over-all quality of the images.
5 comments:
A fiver for an X-700 is the bargain of the year!
Actually four of those, but still my year's best buy.
My cat crash tested the camera this morning when she jumped on my desk and sent it to the floor. Everything seems to be working ok. We'll see what happens with the next roll of film.
I am currently running a roll through a Minolta X-570, the more minimalist version of the X-700. You got a great deal on your X-700!
I'll look forward to seeing what you think of the X-570. I knew nothing about these cameras, but there is a lot on line about them, and I'm enjoying the discovery process.
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