OT: In case your Minolta camera quit

"ASA"? What's that? ;-) I was flummoxed when I went looking for Plus-X several years ago and didn't find it, just a lot of other proprietary names that meant nothing to this old dude. On top of that, all of the films I looked at were marked with some new speed standard, not ASA as I expected. Ah, the days of Plus-X and Tri-X and .... what the heck was the slow, warm, "portrait" Kodak

35mm film?

Excuse me. Need to mix up some more Microdol.

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Michael

I've still got 2 film cameras Canon AE1, metal body, Canon EOS something or the other, plastico crap

The EOS is almost unusable, it doesn't weigh enough for a lot of handheld stuff. But it does have some cute features

martin

Actually, he did for a lot interesting photography with small formats like 35mm (and in fact did a lot to popularize the early Leicas). And he also did a lot of interesting stuff with early Polaroid (Land) cameras and materials. But not his most famous (and most ENLARGED) shots.

If you read his books, he shows you the station wagon he outfitted with a shooting platform on the roof for his larger view cameras :-). Other times he really did hike for miles to get the shot.

While the zone system he used with his large format cameras had the development for each frame tailored to the individual shot, it can be used for rollfilms and 35mm too.

The MOST important manipulations he did are in the darkroom when making the print.

Absolutely.

Tim.

Hello Michael,

to

It was quite easy to do. A tad disappointing was the fact that they put in such a chintzy cap. Not even 15 years and it leaked (!). There is an old Astor BPJ tube radio (from Australia) from the 50's here in the office. The caps in it become quite hot yet they are still fine.

Repairing the old Minolta SRT-100 20 years ago was another ordeal. Fine sand had blown into it on an adventurous trip. I had to remove all those little gears, ropes and pulleys. While waiting for the cap for the X-300 we needed a camera for our foxes. So I pulled out that old SRT-100 and sure enough the meter battery was pooped. 1.35V mercury cell. Now illegal and thus unobtanium, great. Luckily I had squirreled away Ge diodes when I was young and now it can take regular 1.55V cells, on account of ye olde OA91 plus a custom (meaning garage-made) rubber adapter to hold the smaller battery firmly in place.

(#&$%@

IIRC a Mamiya was the Lexus of cameras in those days. Right behind Hasselblad and Leica.

Regards, Joerg

Ah, a mirror lens. Those are remarkably free of chromatic aberration. I haven't used that one, but with a similar 300/5.6 lens, doing astrophotography, I got very sharp images and too many internal reflections.

I find the opposite to be the case, at least with normally developed film. Of course, you have the ability to underdevelop, and that may be what you have in mind.

I don't plan to argue at length, either. I've posted the technical basics, and that's as far as I want to go.

I just today bought my daughter a Nikon D50 with a good zoom lens for $750.

VPS, I think. Kodak keeps rearranging the color negative film line. But Plus-X and Tri-X are still made. The ISO speed scale (dating from about 25 years ago) is the same as ASA and DIN. Thus Tri-X Pan is ISO 400/27.

That is also still available as far as I know. Of course, it's been Microdol-X for about the past half century :)

The 60 mm (120) format is still alive and kicking, both in color and BW. I use Plus-X in my Yashica MAT-124, much better pictures than I get in the 35 mm camera.

- YD.

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The smaller sensor size does make a difference indeed, and make impressive zoom lenses a lot cheaper. I have a konica minolta dimage Z5. Lens can't be removed, but it has 12x *optical* zoom, a 35mm-film equivalent of 35mm-420mm. Why would I want to change lenses?

And this is a relative cheap camera. Paid 350 euro for it.

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Thanks, Frank.
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Joerg wrote: (snip)

My photog days don't go quite as far back as the SRT-100. I do remember seeing many SRT-101's; many of my A.F. colleagues had them.

I still buy Ge diodes (1N84?) on occasion. From allelectronics.com

Now *that* is a ringing indorsement, placing it those two greats! :-) (30 years ago I drooled at the thought of owning a 500C or 500EL) I dunno about Mamiya being a Lexus (I've never touched a Lexus) but my 1000DTL served with perfectly until it coughed up blood. It hiked the Rockies countless times, survived the heat and humidity of SEA (twice), sat unused for about 10 years, and THEN went to Germany (Boeblingen) four times and Austria (Stubaital) twice over a 4-year period. I love the (old) Mamiya auto lenses, am glad I didn't settle for Vivitar. And having both spot *and* averaging meters - behind the lens, where they should be - was heaven.

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Michael

Because you probably have appreciable barrel distortion at one end of the range and appreciable pincushion distortion at the other end. Go photograph a brick wall. You'll be surprised!

I don't know of anyone who had that impression. In 1970, the Mamiya/Sekor

500 TL, 500 DTL, and 1000 DTL were among the cheapest Japanese-made SLRs. Minolta and Nikon cost a good bit more; Pentax cost somewhat more.

Yours must have been after the engineering change that they made around 1971 or 1972. Before that, it had an unreliable shutter. I had one of the unreliable ones; it kept jamming. It was my first SLR and I used it very heavily from 1970 to 1976, then moved to Olympus OM series, with which I was very happy.

I have a 1000 DTL service manual somewhere.

One thing I *did* like about this camera was the compulsory depth-of-field preview (every time you took a meter reading) as well as the dual meters (spot and averaging).

Also, as I've learned recently with astronomy gear, for mechanical stability the M42 screw mount is a better lens mount than any bayonet mount. No springs! The camera and lens are held tightly together and can't flex. If you pull on a Nikon lens, you can move it a fraction of a mm away from the camera because you are flexing the springs inside the lens mount.

Yep, I've been buying '70s Canon cameras and lenses on eBay, for a song. I now have a pretty good collection of the FD series (6 FTb, 1 TLb, and an AE1 camera and several *nice* lenses). I'm going through them finding the best of the batch and then I'll resell the rest. THe cameras average about $30 each (most with lenses) and lenses from $10 to $50 for stuff that originally went for hundred$. These cameras are already almost forty years old and will outlast all but perhaps the highest end digitals going for thousand$.

I intend to scan the negatives and then fo the "photoshop" (Gimp2) thing from there. I may even buy a B&W enlarger to get back into that.

...or a kid.

It's a waste of time and pixels. Do the zoom on the computer if necessary.

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  Keith

6 MPixels is nice. So is that 18-55mm lens that often comes with them. Tell your daughter that she has a very generous father :-)

One area where CCD wins hands down is low light photography. As my final project for the MSEE I designed a CCD camera plus VME interface from scratch. I wanted to achieve much higher than the usual 45dB of dynamic range from those days, and did. When we held it out the window at dusk it blew us away. With your eyes you could see that the car in the distance was some kind of station wagon, probably, or maybe a Jeep. With the camera you could see it was an early 80's model VW Passat with a roof rack and two people in there.

Anyway, the camera is one thing. The collection of lenses a serious photographer typically has boils down to something like this:

16mm fish eye, never had one :-( 28mm wide angle 50mm for portraits (a really good one) 28-70mm for hiking trips 70-210mm for wildlife 250mm for serious scenery and wildlife (lots of $$) 500mm for mountain hikes

This is an investment in the high four digits, usually. If they must be basically benched forever upon switching to digital a lot of non-pro photographer will hesitate. I know that the focal lengths may not be a good fit for CCD sensor formats but at least some should be suited for continued use. Adapter mounts or, better, exchange mounts would be ok but typically there are none available for digital cameras.

Regards, Joerg

This is exactly why folks have a whole collection of lenses. Even the

3:1 zoom lenses I have are only for hiking trips where lugging all the individual lenses isn't feasible. But our 70-210mm is not as good at 210mm as the (more expensive) 250mm fixed lens is. Not even close.

Regards, Joerg

I am certainly know expert. But I remember our photo class where the school had a few cameras to be loaned out. I used my father's old Agfa but others wanted to try the new stuff. In case someone desired to have the Mamiya the teacher requested to be really careful with that one. When she mentioned what it had cost our jaws dropped. Maybe there were different category models.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Keith,

Sometimes you can have the film developed and a CD made. The best ones will not just contain JPEG but also the full bitmaps. That's really nice. It usually only adds a few Dollars and when they run a promotion the CD can be as low as $1.

Regards, Joerg