Category: Photography - MINSAN SAUERS

Pentax K1000

11/16/2014

This has long been the standard camera for film students, as it is incredibly simple, no -frills, and solidly built. The lenses I have for it are superb and I got several very sharp pictures as a result. Unfortunately, I had a mishap when rewinding and ended up opening the camera before the roll was all the way re-wound. So, several pictures are now fine examples of light leak....

Canon Rebel K2

11/5/2014

This is a perfectly clean example of the camera Canon used to take over the world. Few SLR's are as well known as the Canon Rebel, and this one doesn't disappoint. Fitted with the ubiquitous 35-80mm lens, it took reliable picture after picture.

Minolta Maxxum 5000i

11/5/2014

Using a fully automatic film camera sometimes feels like cheating. This camera has fast autofocus, automatic metering, and even a built in flash, so the challenge for me was to actually choose Manual mode and do something artistic. I've got to say though, that the option of fully automatic mode was handy when I was in a hurry or unsure of how to expose a scene...

Vintage Lens Collection

10/28/2014

In the past year, I've been collecting vintage cameras and lenses, these are almost all of them. It's a lot of fun, but they do take up a bit of space.....

Yashica 230AF

10/9/2014

This rather ugly camera is from the late 1980's and is now an abandoned platform. Yashica had been bought up by Kyocera and had a beautiful lens with the Kyocera and Yashica brands on it. The lens is super heavy duty and produced very sharp images. (I have the 28-85mm). The camera was produced in response to the success of Minolta's auto-focusing units, but it never gained the popularity, and sadly there are no modern DSLR's that use this mount so the lens is only useable on the old cameras. (unlike the Minolta lenses that can be used on new Sony DSLRs, and the Canon, Nikon, and Pentax AF lenses that can also be used on their modern counterparts.)
The funny looking flash actually slides on to the hotshoe and uses the main camera battery for power. It's ugly, but it works well as most of the indoor shots you see are with the flash.

Yashica Electro 35 GSN

9/25/2014

This little beauty was part of a larger collection I got from a local collector who's decided it was time to downsize.

These were made in the mid 1970's and are very simple to use, but actually produce beautiful images. It is fixed with a 45mm f/1.7 lens, but it's closest focusing distance is about 2.6 ft. so no macro shots with this guy. I used a long expired roll of Solaris 400 ISO film so I was surprised how well the pictures came out.

Canon EOS 10s

9/25/2014

The EOS 10s was released in 1991 and discontinued in 1994. It was the 2nd best camera Canon made at the time so I guess it's the 5D MkIII of its day.
This came in a group of cameras I obtained from a nice couple re-locating to Florida. The roll of Kodak Gold 200 in it was only half shot up so I finished it off. The coloring was way off for indoor shots, which I'm not sure if it was just the age of the film, or 200 speed film is just no good for indoor shots, but the images weren't very impressive. The outdoor shots were alright though and the 35-135mm f/4 USM lens that came with it is no slouch. It might be interesting to try more shots with modern lenses, which is entirely possible since it uses the same EOS mount as our modern DSLRs.

Five Star 500mm f/8

9/24/2014

So if you ever thought about picking up one of these cheapies for some distance shooting, don't bother. You can get them for $50 or so on eBay, but I got it thrown in with a bunch of camera stuff I bought. Will it focus light onto your camera sensor or film and produce an image? Yes. Will the image be tolerable on Facebook? Sure. Can you zoom in and see sharp detail? Not on your life. Oh, and I hope you like chromatic aberration too...

Minolta Maxxum 3Xi

9/21/2014

So I got this camera as something of a freebie when I bought some more vintage ones. It has a crack in the case where the handgrip is, but it didn't seem to affect it's ability to take pictures. This is a 1991-1994 era machine with all kinds of bells and whistles including a sensor in the grip and eyepiece that causes the camera to start focusing when you put your eye up to the viewfinder. I didn't care much for that feature, but it's a nice little camera that uses the same lenses as current Sony DSLRs.

Grandpa's Canon Sure Shot Owl

9/19/2014

I recently received my Grandpa's last camera that he owned before passing several years ago. It was wonderful to see the pictures he had taken, plus the roll wasn't finished so I got to take a few shots with it too!

A Tank of a Lens - Nikon 105mm f/2.5

9/12/2014

This old beauty is a hefty piece of gear from roughly 1973-1975, that just produces beautiful images. I was really pleased with the results of using this lens on the 7D and I'm looking forward to using this one a lot more! It's the P.C. version meaning it's 5 elements in 4 groups and multi-coated, which is the same specs as Nikon's brand new version.

More Film Photography

8/27/2014

Well, film was just supposed to be a little diversion, but lately I've been getting more and more fascinated by it. I just developed another roll of Fuji 400 shot with the Canon AE-1 Program. In general I think the pictures are underexposed, but some of them turned out pretty good. Next time I might try lying to the camera and setting it for slightly slower than ASA 400 so it will cook the pictures a little longer...

B&W Film with the Canon AE-1

3/21/2014

I got a chance to use the Canon AE-1 Program that had some Kodak T400 black and white film in it. Here's the pictures I managed to get with it and the 70-200mm zoom lens. I like the results with B&W but the processing is about 2x the money so I don't foresee doing much more of this kind of shooting!

Shooting with film

2/3/2014

So the other day I picked up a Minolta X370 35mm film camera at the Goodwill store, and it had a roll of film in it! I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if I could get any decent pictures with it. At first I just matched the settings I would have used with the DSLR but that didn't seem very sporting so I went for the Av mode the camera offers. Below are my results. Obviously not as stunning as I would have liked, but they're a step up from the colored blobs I've been known to get from time to time...

Manual Focus Lenses

12/15/2013

A couple fortuitous finds have quickly grown my collection of vintage lenses. These neat old lenses usually have really low f-stops so they work great for low light filming.

Additionally, since they were manual focus only, the focus rings are very smooth, and have a very slow turning ratio, which allows you to precisely pull focus much more easily than with modern glass. Oh, did I mention they're really cheap compared to new lenses?

The best deals on these lenses usually involve getting the old camera too so I did a little photo shoot of my collection thus far.