What could be better than a free camera? This nice Minolta XG1 was free to me. One of my nieces and her husband were out thrift shopping and stumbled upon a sale that had two boxes of 'old camera stuff'. They popped the $2 and sent them to me. With the exception of this camera, the rest was old Super8 movie cameras.
When I got it the grunge was pretty bad and all over the body. After cleaning it up and putting in a fresh battery, I noticed there were still problems with it. The right side mirror pivot arm had come loose and the mirror was wedged all cattywompus. This also had the film advance and shutter jammed. With some careful disassembly and reassembly I was able to restore functionality without even scratching the mirror. After I was finished, the only thing that doesn't function is?? Yep you guessed it, the meter. This camera has an aperture priority mode and when selected the meter tells the shutter to fire at a 2 second rate no matter what the light conditions are. Not an issue for me though. This little guy has a nice Rokkor 45mm f2 lens that is spotless, it also has shutter speeds up to 1/1000th, ASA range of 50 to 1600 with plus/minus 2 EV, 1/60th flash sync on the hot shoe, self timer, and a cable release. Below is my favorite photograph from the test roll that I put through this nice 35mm camera.
The film I used for this photograph was Efke KB100 that expired 03/09. I really like this film and this photograph is a good example of why I like it. I bought it on a 100' roll to make up 35mm cassettes and after sitting in a temp controlled environment it still performs with no loss of speed after two years.
The developer I used was D-76 1+1. This film developed in D-76 is capable of competing with the more expensive films that are still available. When exposed properly, this film/developer combination will yield remarkable sharpness and with nice tonal graduation. This is a nice combination to shoot using the Zone System with predictable results. The other developer that I really like this film in is Rodinal 1+100 stand process for 60 minutes. As Rodinal is an acutance developer the grain will be more pronounced but it will extend the tonal graduation.
Minolta XG1 ƒ16 1/250th
Expired (03/09) Efke KB100
D-76 1+1 9:30min 20º C
No comments:
Post a Comment