Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The EF3 came in a number of colours and Konica marketed it as ‘The Fashion conscious camera’ back in 1983.  Regrettably mine is plane old black but still does an admiral job.  The primary reason being the 35mm F2.8 lens with 5 elements.  As a camera with a fully automatic exposure system though you can’t select a manual aperture which can be an issue with zone focusing.  The easiest way to use zone focusing involves pre-setting it to a distance and then snapping the picture when the subject is at that distance.  In order for this to work well it requires a certain amount of leeway with the depth of field.  The problem with the EF3 as I mentioned is the lack of control of the depth of field through setting the aperture. If the camera chooses f2.8  there is a higher probability of the subject being out of focus.   However in adequate light and with a fast enough film the camera is bound to stop down the aperture and the number of in focus shots will improve as well as the optical quality.

A major limitation though is the narrow shutter speed range of 1/60 – 1/500 second which is good for reducing camera shake but again forcing the need for the larger apertures.

The Kodak T550 is a diminutive camera that separated itself from the rest of the APS pack with a flash that flipped up from its other duty as a lens cover. The 28mm f3.5 lens gives an angle of view similar to a 35mm lens on a 35mm film camera when you use the entire film area of 30.2mmx16.7mm.  With each APS exposure the full image area is recorded and with that also recorded magnetically the aspect ratio setting the user had selected.  There were three settings known as H (high definition), C  (Classic) and P (Panoramic) so while the entire image area was always recorded, during printing the machine would read the magnetic info and crop the images accordingly.  I prefer to use the full 16:9 aspect ratio for composing images as it is the one interesting thing about APS film.  And it shouldn’t be a surprise but I used out of date non refrigerated film with an unknown history as that is my primary source of APS film.

This is my second Minolta Freedom Vista, the first one I had was stolen with a few other items from my vehicle. This one is every bit as beat up as that one was but despite the weathered look it performed well.  I do need to find and remove all the little fibers that must be around the edge of the film mask as they show up on every image. The defining feature of this camera is of course its ability to shoot panoramic images with its 24mm lens.  The caveat being that it can not be used to create anything other than panoramas.  Having this sole purpose though allowed Minolta to provide it with a nice large viewfinder dedicated to the effort, and it makes composing with such a different aspect ratio fun.  That aspect ratio is a wide 2.6:1 which falls among various widescreen cinematic ratios.

The lens on the Freedom Vista is a 24mm  f4.5 with five elements.  It’s only at the outer edges where the chromatic aberrations really show themselves which is amazing considering how thin the camera is and how close to the film plane this places the lens.

So in summary composing with this camera offers some small opportunity to try your hand at creating unique compositions and the large single purpose viewfinder is superior to any other point and shoot that offers a panoramic mode.