The Marvelous 7s

My Minolta Hi-Matic 7s was the last great thrift store. bargain in my collection of old film cameras; I got it about five years ago for less than what it now costs for a single roll of film.  It came with a case and a lens cover, and it works like new.  The 1.8/45mm Rokker lens is superb and the CLC metering system achieves perfect exposures under any lighting condition.   I especially like the auto-parallax correction which is a big aid to precise framing.

Like many of the mid-'60s cameras, the 7s meter wanted a 1.35V mercury battery.  That battery is no longer available, but a 1.5V battery has always worked well for me, though it does make a better fit in the compartment if you add a rubber O-ring and top it with a small pad of aluminum foil for good contact.  All of the camera's many features are well documented in the 7s manual at the Butkus site.

The 7s is particularly well suited to street work because of its quiet shutter and reliable performance.  The camera hangs nicely from the neck strap, and on a sunny day you can select a small aperture for maximum depth of focus and shoot from the hip with abandon.  On a sunny Friday stroll through Old Town Albuquerque I finished off a roll of Kentmere 400 in about twenty minutes.

 

 

Inside and Out

 I suspect a lot of people, when they first encounter a Minolta Hi-Matic 7s wonder if the fully automatic exposure system is really going to work.  It just seems too easy to simply press the shutter release and get a perfectly exposed picture every time.

I experimented a bit with mine, checking the metered values when the camera was on full auto, and then with the shutter and aperture set manually.  It did seem to be consistent in its performance, so it seemed the next step should be a real-world test.  I started a roll of Kodak UltraMax 400 on Wednesday at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and then took the camera on Friday for a walk around Old Town Albuquerque.

I could not find anything to complain about in how the HiMatic 7s handled the full range of lighting from dim interiors to full sun in the Plaza Vieja.

No camera, of course, is perfect.  The display of EV values only in the meter leaves one wishing for aperture and shutter numbers.  Size and weight are the other big issues.  The camera, while of extraordinary build quality, is a heavy-weight among rangefinders.  Here is a comparison picture showing the HiMatic 7s next to the little Olympus 35 RC, also having auto-exposure.

Seeing that Olympus was racing ahead in its light-weight design, Minolta did make the next model of the HiMatic much closer in size to the 35 RC.  With use, though, one does get used to a bit of added bulk.  And, the 1.8/45mm Rokkor lens on the Minolta has got to be one of the best lenses to emerge from the 1960s.

Old Town Farm

We rode our bikes to Old Town Farm to meet friends for breakfast.  I took along my Minolta Hi-Matic 7s. 

I shot the whole roll of Gekko MW 100 in fully automatic mode and developed in caffenol.  The brightly lit scenes looked ok, but the camera seemed befuddled in low light.   Not having the proper mercury battery may have contributed to the less than perfect outcome, though I had better results with the last roll of color I shot in the camera.

Cinestill 800T

 In sorting out the expired film in my refrigerator I came across a roll of Cinestill 800T.  It was only six months past the expiration date, so I decided to give it a try.  It seemed a good idea to start with some interior shots since the film is said to be balanced for indoor lighting, so I made half a dozen shots of my cat.

On the way out the door I thought to myself that I should really have a filter on the Minolta Himatic 7S to account for the fact that I had Tungsten-balanced film in the camera.  However, when I processed the film the images looked to me like those I would expect from normal outdoor color film.

The first few frames had light leak streaks across them, but the rest looked ok.  It seemed likely that the felt light trap on the film cartridge might be at fault.  Otherwise, I thought the grain and color looked pretty good, though not what I expected.

I probably would not consider using this film again because of the twelve dollar cost per roll.  I still have some curiosity about this stuff, however.  One of the most appealing photos I ever came across on Flickr was made on Cinestill by David Ramos.  If I thought that I could come close to what he got from the film, the cost would not be an issue.

Albuquerque Annotated

I picked up some 1.4 volt batteries on eBay recently to see if that would give a bit of a boost to my exposures from the Minolta Hi-Matic 7s.  The slight decrease in voltage did not seem to have any noticeable effect on the camera's performance.  Still, the full-auto exposure works pretty consistently, and setting the ASA to a lower value seems like it will improve results.  I shot a roll of Kodak ColorPlus 200 in the camera over period of a couple weeks.



This customized Honda at the back entrance to Old Town had an appealing rough-and-ready look.  Such sightings start me thinking about getting another bike.  My vision may be up to the challenge since I had the cataracts excised, but my reflexes probably don't support the idea.

I understand the appeal of the electric scooters which are all over Albuquerque, but I'm even less likely to get on one of these than I am on a motorcycle.  The city's transportation infrastructure is already in desperate shape, and the town clearly is not ready for an army of scooter riders.  An illustration of that was provided for me at the risky intersection near our house early yesterday.
    I heard a loud bang signaling a crash and looked out the window to see an SUV stopped in the middle of the street.  There was a scooter on its side about 30 feet north of the impact point. The rider was crumpled against the curb and moaning.  No helmet.  No regard for road rules.  Predictable.

I have an odd connection to a photographer who shows his work on Flickr, Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga.   He and I often post pictures taken at the same places in Old Town at the same time of day, but I've never seen him.  He has a good eye for architectural subjects, rather better than mine.

I often pick up a copy of the city's alternative newspaper, The Alibi, during my walks through Old Town.  The quality of writing in the free publication varies widely, but the staff gets to stories which you won't see in the lumbering Albuquerque Journal.  These two boxes look to me like cartoon characters that might scamper around the plaza in the early morning when no one is looking.

The Rio Grande has retreated to its bed after a season of heavy flooding.  There is quite a bit of debris left on the trails through the bosque, but the summer heat is rapidly drying the ground.

Albuquerque has a vast flood control system which includes this strange dam face on the city's east side, a favorite subject of 'burque photographers.  Between the flash flooding from the Sandias and the river's high waters, there would not be a city here without these kinds of structures.

Cars in Color

After finishing the roll of TMAX 400 in my Ansco Panda I made another trip through the museum car show with the Minolta Hi-Matic 7s loaded with Kodak ColorPlus 200.

All the Hi-Matic shots were made with the camera in full-auto exposure mode.  The camera was built to accommodate a 1.35v Mercury battery.  Not having that, I used a 1.5v and adjusted the ASA down to 125.  The exposure values shown in the camera's viewfinder matched those of a reliable handheld meter, but I still got a bit of underexposure in the negatives.  I think there are some 1.4v batteries available that might give better results, so I'll try to track down a source.
     I'm not sure how the coupled meter adjusts both the speed and the aperture.  The shutter release has quite a long throw, so I suspect the mechanism works in a somewhat similar fashion to the way exposure is handled by the Olympus RC, although the Oly offers only shutter-priority and full-manual modes.

The full-auto mode in the Hi-Matic 7s is not entirely to my liking due to the fact that the meter reading in the viewfinder only displays an EV value, so you do not know the exact aperture and shutter settings that are being selected by the system.  Theoretically, you can set the Hi-Matic's shutter and let the camera adjust the aperture, but I'll need to get a battery with the proper voltage to make sure that everything is working as designed.  Of course, full-manual operation is also an option, but the narrowness and closeness of the setting rings on the lens makes that process a bit awkward.