Minolta Super A
The Minolta Super A is fairly loud, it sounds more like an SLR with a reflex mirror than a rangefinder with a leaf shutter. It doesn’t leave you guessing though about whether it clicked or not. I find it to be an attractive though very heavy camera. You can read more about it at my post here Minolta Super-A . The lens is not very flare resistant and allowing the sun to hit the front element results in a huge drop in contrast and a lot of lens flare.
I suppose if it were just about the image and nothing else I would stop using these older film cameras and just shoot digital but there is something that’s hard to pin down in the experience of shooting a nice mechanical camera. If you think about it there is nothing in the experience that is technically superior to modern equipment and I don’t have waves of nostalgia sweeping over me. So what is it? I think it may just be the joy of well made things just like someone might enjoy having a nice watch or a good set of cooking pots I happen to like cameras. As well I like the look of film images and there may lay a little bit of nostalgia because every photographic image I saw for the first 2/3 of my life was made using film of some sort and that is what I am used to and like. That isn’t to say I don’t like digital imagery and that there isn’t great new work being done with digital of course there is but it isn’t from that formative time in my life, it doesn’t look like the images I saw in National Geographic or any other magazine of my childhood. It makes me wonder if someone who has grown up in a time when digital photography has always around will see any attraction to film images, but then this is also the same sort of transition that occurred when colour photography became more prevalent and was brought into the contemporary art world. It wasn’t that long ago really that serious photography was done with black and white film because that’s how it always had been.
