X-700

I took the Minolta X-700 and two lenses to the Biopark to shoot the African Forest Lily which blooms in the conservatory in January and February.

The first shot is with the 135mm and a +2 closeup accessory lens.  Shooting slow film in 35mm is something of a challenge in a greenhouse.  I would likely have had better results either with a tripod or using medium format with 400-speed film.

Outdoors, the use of the normal and telephoto lenses presented no problems.  However, my negatives were a bit thin, so I'll try the next roll with a +1 exposure setting which worked well for me with the XG-1.

The Minolta Celtic 2.8/28mm lens I ordered on ebay showed up the next day on my porch.  It was gray, cold day, but I wanted to see what the lens would do. so I finished off the roll of TMAX with Roxie at the dog park.  Poor light, but the lens looks like it will be a sharp shooter.

I'm enjoying learning to use the Minolta X-700.  I borrowed one from a neighbor six or eight years ago, shot just one roll and decided I didn't like the camera.  Having shot a Spotmatic for forty years, I felt that the X-700 had too many buttons to deal with, and I was a little unhappy at the time with the plastic components.  Now, having spent some time with the manual and experiencing the excellence of the Minolta lenses I am pleased to have the opportunity to work with a full kit.

Verticals

I took a cool early morning stroll through Albuquerque's Old Town with my restored Rokkor-QD 3.5/135mm lens mounted on a Minolta XG-1.  The perspective provided by the long lens forced most of my compositions into a vertical mode.  I was happy with the performance of the lens; less so with the camera.

I bought two Minolta XG-1 cameras with no intention of using either one.  The first donated its prism to the restoration of my Retina Reflex, and I just hacked the prism out of the camera with no regard for what was left behind.  The second XG-1 came along with the Rokkor-QD telephoto for a total price of twelve bucks.  That one worked ok, but the plastic top deck had a number of cracks.  I replaced the top with the one from the first XG-1 to see how the camera would perform.
    The electronic shutter has some issues.  I like the small size and light weight of the XG-1, but I likely won't devote more time to its restoration as my garage-sale Minolta X-700 seems to be in good working order and it is a fundamentally superior camera to the XG-1.  I have ordered a Celtic 2.8/28mm lens for the X-700 to accompany the normal lens and the telephoto, and I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with the kit.

Couldn't pass it by...

In addition to the eye-catching thrift store price tag, the Minolta Hi-Matic 7s looked nearly new, the rangefinder seemed accurate, and the shutter clicked.  The camera dates to 1966; it strongly resembles the slightly earlier Yashica Lynx and is about as large and heavy.  I'm not usually partial to the over-sized 35mm cameras of this era, but the 7s has some redeeming qualities.

The nicest feature for me, as was true of the Yashica Lynx 14, is that the bright frame viewfinder is auto-correcting for parallax.  The CdS sensor is set inside the filter ring and exposure is fully automated while also allowing manual control of aperture and shutter speed.  The 45mm f1.8 Rokkor is a six-element design.  The Seiko-LA shutter has speeds from 1/8 to 1/500, plus B and Auto settings. The meter originally required a mercury battery, but a 1.55v 357 seems to work fine, even though it fits loosely in the compartment.  Aside from putting in the battery, the only other thing I had to do for the camera was to clean the finger marks off the viewfinder window.  I shot a roll of Tri-X to test the camera.

When I was 21 I bought a Buick like this one from a dealer in Glenns Ferry, Idaho for $500.  It had leather upholstery, air conditioning and an automatic transmission -- a real luxury machine.  I drove it to Mexico City and back.  It was the nicest car I ever owned.

Update:
Johan Niels Kuiper has an excellent review of the Minolta Hi-Matic 7S with some good advice on how to use the EV exposure system.

Return To Sender

I tried to give away this Genos Rapid three times, but it kept coming back.

Everything And Nothing

I carried around my Olympus Infinity Stylus in my pocket for about a week trying to use up 36 frames on a roll of Fuji 200.

Found

I bought these four prints for two bucks each at a local thrift store.  They are nicely mounted on 11x14 black matte board.  A couple have captions and titles, but none are signed.  It seems likely they were part of an exhibit.

The terrain visible in the last shot looks to me a lot like the country near Prewitt, New Mexico.  There is a Navajo community there.  However, the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos are near-by to the East and the Zuni Reservation is a short distance to the West of Prewitt.  The subjects look pretty relaxed, which may indicate that the photographer was a member of the community.

I would like to know who the photographer was, and perhaps find some more of his/her work.  I'm thinking that one possibility would be to visit the area and show around the pictures.  Margaret and I have often visited the Chaco outlier ruins in this area, so we will probably get a chance to drive over there some time soon.

Acros in the Kodak Reflex II

I got the lenses back on the Reflex II and then took a walk in the neighborhood to catch the remains of the last snow storm.

I mostly shoot 400 speed film with my medium format cameras, but I really like the Acros/Rodinal combination.

The close-ups I did with the camera were a little soft, so I'll need to try again to adjust the focus properly.  I think I'll likely go all the way with cleaning and adjusting as the Reflex II is really pretty easy to work on compared to most twin lens reflex cameras.  I just used the ruby window on this occasion for advancing the film, but it is faster and safer to let the camera handle the spacing when things are working right.

Bing

Part of the attraction in shooting old film cameras for me is that they provide a portal to understanding the opportunities and challenges of photography in years gone by.  Box cameras, folders and rangefinders can seem awkward in use, but photographers have made outstanding images from all of them.  Of course, there are limits to how much understanding one can derive from just using old technology, but that is a start and there is much help available from historians, biographers and critics.

For me, the 1920s and 1930s have always seemed photography's most interesting period because of the era's confluence of technical developments and aesthetic awareness, largely centered in France and Germany.  The best guide to that era I have come across is a book by Larisa Dryansky, Ilse Bing: Photography through the Looking Glass.  The book is a bit rare and rather pricey, so I felt very fortunate to pick up a copy for just ten dollars at a local used book store.

Ilsa Bing's photography career started off in Frankfurt with the childhood gift from her family of a box camera.  She acquired a Voigtlander plate camera in 1928 which she used to document the subject of her art history thesis.  In 1929 Bing bought herself a Leica and stuck with that choice through nearly all of her work.  She used what then was considered a miniature film format to explore the full gamut of photographic possibilities including street photography, portraiture and advertising illustration.  Her photographs appeared in leading magazines of the day in Paris and Frankfurt and her work was exhibited in many fine art galleries in Europe and America.

The nice thing about Dryansky's book is that it not only provides and excellent account of the photographer's life and a critical assessment of Bing's work, but it also shows Bing's innovative photographic efforts in the context of the time.  Paris in the 1930s offered Bing endless photo opportunities, but the city also was a cauldron of experimentation and discovery in every artistic genre.  Many of the photographers who were most highly regarded at the time were women.  Bing's friends and contemporaries inclluded Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Lisette Model, Gisèle Freund and many others.  Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the innovative work of these pioneers of photographic modernism was driven into at least temporary obscurity by the economic downturn of the 1930s and the calamitous world war.

In spite of her wholehearted embrace of French culture Bing was interned by the French as an enemy alien and,ironically, with the victorious advance of the Germans she faced exposure to the Holocaust.  Bing ultimately escaped to the U.S., but her photographic ambition and career entered a long downturn along with the whole idea of photography as a fine art.  Bing experimented with medium format and color for a time, but she gave up on producing any kind of still photography by 1959.  Fortunately, she lived a long life and saw a renewal of interest in her pre-war work in the 1970s.

I do not believe I have ever come across a book on the history of photography which did not include some technical errors, and Dryansky is no exception.  I only recall one error in this work -- a misstatement of the length of the film strip in a 35mm cartridge.  That kind of error would be easily avoided by just having a competent photographer proofread the text, but no one seems to think of that.  More importantly, there is nearly always a lack of perspective in regard to the photographic process.  Attention is always given to what kinds of cameras were used by a particular photographer, but there is seldom any recognition of the the film technology which made the whole enterprise viable.  Likewise, the abilities of photographers to artfully compose images is given great weight, but the equally important tasks of film processing and printing are nearly always given short shrift.  In Bing's time prints and half-tone reproductions were the only way to view images, so it seems that more attention to that end of the process really ought to get more recognition.

Ilse Bing's "Self Portrait with Leica, Paris 1931" has become the iconic representation of that era, but there are many other examples of her work easily accessible on line, with a particularly good collection at the web site of the International Center of Photography in Tucson.

Snow

A sunny day illuminated the Sandia Mountains graced with a six-inch layer of snow.  I took the dog and my Kodak Reflex II tlr loaded with TMY 400 for a walk up the Embudito Trail.  I got a couple overlapping frames on the roll, but the camera otherwise performed pretty well until I reached the eighth frame.

I was able during the first half of the walk to let the dog loose while I concentrated on making pictures.  When I started running into people and their dogs I had to put the dog back on the leash, and that pushed beyond the boundaries of success with an old tlr.

Near the top of the trail I decided to try a close-up shot.  I got the film advanced to the eighth frame, but my slightlly impaired  vision, the dog pulling on the leash and numb hands ended my photo session.  I stared cranking the focus without really seeing or feeling what I was doing and managed to completely screw off both lenses which dropped into the snow.  While that was it for the tlr, I thought I might still grab a few shots on the way back down the mountain with the Olympus Infinity Stylus I had in my pocket.  Looking at the time, however, I saw that it was 3:30 PM.  I was supposed to be sitting down to dinner with freinds at 4:30 and we were at the top of a long, slippery trail and a drive across town.  So, I just hooked up the dog and we made as close as I could get to a lightning descent.

The next day, after consulting Rick Oleson's exploded-view drawing  and the berndtmn camera repair page, I spent a couple hours reinstalling and collimating the lenses on the Reflex II.  I'll load a roll of Acros to see if I got the focus properly set.  Most of the snow was burned off the Sandias after another day of sunshine, but we look to be in for another big storm starting on New Years Day.