Minolta XE-7 with Really Really expired Fuji HG100 film
The Minolta XE-7 is one solid camera, you can see that its outer shell is made of brass where the paint has worn away. Brass not being know for its light weight qualities. But even though its a hefty camera that is offset by the feel and operation. Of all the cameras I have ever owned or used it has the single smoothest film advance that requires the least effort. Another nice touch is a small window that allows you to see the aperture setting from the viewfinder, this feature made its way into the later Minolta X-700 which was my first SLR. One drawback of its electronic shutter is that it requires batteries to operate through its range of 4 seconds to 1/1000 second, Bulb mode can be used without batteries though. Fortunately it uses two easily attained LR44 batteries for power. It also has a viewfinder blind to block stray light if you are using Bulb. The shutter on the camera is a “CLS” or Copal Leitz which was a joint venture between the Japanese and German companies and results in a very quiet shutter that appears to be just as accurate today as it was 40 years ago. Other things that this camera has that give it almost everything you could need in an SLR is depth of field preview, exposure compensation and even the ability to do multiple exposures. This is done after the first exposure by sliding the lever found at the base of the film advance clockwise until a little red dot is visible. Then cock the shutter, the film will not have advanced and you can take the second exposure. The multiple exposure lever will return to its original place. You can do this repeatedly, cocking the shutter and exposing the film by moving the multiple exposure lever prior to each shutter cocking. So if your willing to pack around a 775gram film camera (without a lens) this is close to as good as it gets.
As for the film it was some extremely expired Fuji HG100 film. Being around 20 years out of date I figured my best bet was to expose it 2 stops slower so I set the camera to 24ASA. Even then I don’t think hitting it with more light helped greatly. It was just fogged and had a weird colour shift. That’s okay I meant to do that.
