I was amazed to see that the last time I use the Minolta V2 was back in 2012 Minolta V2 Part 1 the surprise primarily comes from the fact that this is a fantastic camera and is one of my favourite camera designs of all time. It’s also a very good camera and has the amazingly fast 1/2000 of a second shutter speed as well as a fantastic 45mm f2.0 lens of 6 elements. Here is a larger sample scan of a fairly grainy Agfa 200 film shot.
The Ricoh EFS looks like a rangefinder but is in fact a zone focus camera which is too bad but this allowed it to be very inexpensive back in the early 1980’s which doesn’t matter now as time has been a great equalizer for film cameras. Another way they kept the cost down was that it only has one fixed shutter speed of 1/125 second. The aperture varies from f2.8 to f22 and anything outside of that will result in under or over exposure. All that aside it’s a fun camera for what it is and easy to use. The lens is 4 elements in three groups and every once and awhile conditions conspire to create a sharp image but mostly the zone focus just gets you in the ball park.
I punished this little camera with some bad film, not for anything it did but I just needed to make an example out of it for my other cameras. “See what will happen to you if you don’t do as I wish” I suppose the admonition ‘This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you” holds true. I can’t actually make any kind of real determination about this camera based on expired Kodak Gold 200. The fact that it was necessary to mention on the front of the camera that it has a glass lens gives you a sense of its cheap plastic nature. As I like using the 28mm focal length I may give this camera another chance but it’s pretty clear that it’s not going to beat many other options optically, just use your imagination.
I enjoy using my diminutive Pentax Q7 and find that it lends itself well to creating images that have a film look in particular black and white conversions. In this case though I wanted to envoke the look of film shot in bright summer light. Perhaps film that is now a little out of date too. As with all Lightroom presets they should be thought of as starting points.
This was created with Lightroom 5.7 and can be downloaded here Q summer film
I have mixed feelings about Lomochrome Purple which matches the mixed results I’ve gotten. Perhaps my expectations of achieving a look along the lines of an infrared film are at fault but it’s also the fact that it doesn’t appear to shift in colour in quite the way Lomography suggests. You can see from the chart I did to go with my first post how the colours shift Lomochrome Purple. I like how deep blues turn cyan and yellows turn a pink but I’m frustrated by the lack of shift I have achieved with green the one colour I had the highest hope for. I will have to rethink the way I use this film if I do again. Choosing things that people know to be a certain colour are the most effective, something that could be green or purple isn’t going to have the same impact as say seeing a pink line down the middle of a road or a sunflower that looks like a shade of alizarin crimson.
On one side is a digital image from the same scene as the Lomochrome Purple version opposite.
I was kindly lent a Contax G1 and three lenses and took the opportunity to shoot four rolls of film with it. The first thing you notice on picking it up is that it is an absolute gem. The level of finish is exceptional it feels like it was milled out of a solid block of titanium. It does have a nice rubberized grip but is a little too heavy to easily use one-handed. The autofocus works well as long as you ensure that you set the center focus point on the subject. That’s fine for individual portraits but it caught me out a couple of times when it focused between two people despite my efforts. Additionally the focus is the loudest aspect of the camera drowning out the shutter and film advance although not really achieving objectionable levels. It’s too bad because even using manual focus doesn’t mitigate the noise as it works by ‘fly by wire’ and focuses to the distance you set on the top dial. Strangely when you change to manual focus rather than providing you an indication of the actual distance in the viewfinder as it does with autofocus it just gives an uncalibrated indication of whether you are setting focus in front or behind what the autofocus has determined. That and the fact that the manual focus dial is easily knocked inadvertently I would suggest that leaving it in AF mode is the order of the day. Moving on to the viewfinder there is good news and bad news. The good news is that it adjusts it’s field of view depending on the lens that is mounted. To achieve this though it would seem that it was necessary to engineer it much like the viewfinder you would see on a zoom point and shoot and the result is that it is a small viewfinder that is sometimes hard to bring quickly to the eye, like is possible with a fixed lens rangefinder, that’s the bad. Additionally on the good side of things the viewfinder automatically changes its masking to adjust for parallax and focus.
Okay that’s all well and good, it’s a beautiful piece of camera engineering but what about the lenses? Well if the camera is a gem the lenses are diamonds. The standard lens the Zeiss T* Planar 2/45 is perfectly matched and exquisitely built. With the camera I was also lent the 28mm f2 Biogon and 90mm f2 Sonnar two lenses equally as beautiful. The legendary Zeiss T* coating is evident on all the lenses. In the center of the lens barrel is the aperture ring with a nice solid detent for each setting. Because the manual focus is done at the body there are no other external moving parts to the lens. The lenses are as good optically as they are aesthetically pleasing. The rendering of out of focus areas (bokeh) is terrific giving the images a strong three dimensionality. Unfortunately the limited number of aperture blades shows in the background highlights as hexagonal shapes rather than nicely rounded as is possible with more or curved blades. All three lenses have exceptional sharpness from corner to corner they may very well be the best film camera lenses I’ve ever used.
A few other features of the camera are its top shutter speed of 1/2000 of a second it has +-2 EV exposure compensation and will do three frame bracketing. You do have to be careful if you override the DX reading system to set a manual ISO as it does not revert back, it can be very easy to accidentally leave it at an incorrect setting (Something to remember) Also it’s not impossible to forget to remove the lens cap although you will get a very wrong exposure as the metering is TTL which is another amazing piece of engineering. It actually uses the light reflected off the shutter curtain to determine exposure.
One thing about one camera: It was the first ever autofocus rangefinder camera
Here are some of my first sample images there are more to come after I develop more film
The Ricoh TF500D is interesting in that it provides two focal lengths (35mm & 70mm) it does this by swinging a second set of lens elements into the optical path. This differs from a zoom lens of course where all the elements are used for all the focal lengths.
I certainly like that the Ricoh TF-500D provides a 35mm f2.8 lens but how useful is the 70mm f5.6 option? First off the lens is surprisingly good and gives nicely rendered out of focus backgrounds at 70mm. However deploying it is an aggressive noisy display with things whirring and clunking into place. It’s best not done while pointing the camera at someone. Even the movement of the lens for focusing is noisy but such is the price of using a camera that is around 25 years old. The LCD top panel is great for providing useful information such as the ISO and the number of frames remaining. The level of user control is very limited though, primarily being the +2EV backlight compensation and the two focal lengths. The D in the name of the camera denotes that it has a date function which will continue to be relevant until the end of 2019, at which point I will throw the camera into a recycling bin, take it apart or set it to 1985, at this point I’m not sure 4 years seems a long way off. All joking aside the camera surprised me with its fine results (factoring in the fact I used terrible outdated film). The 35mm lens alone is comprised of 4 elements with the 70mm adding an additional 4 elements behind the shutter. At 35mm the lens is as good or better than any of the alternatives from that time and the 70mm is actually usable too.
Here is an easy way to help determine whether you are taking a selfie or a self-portrait.
Rather than my usual camera write up followed by a gallery of images I thought I would do this post differently. I will be posting the images in the body with text. I had the opportunity to take a stern wheeler tour from New Westminster to Steveston along the Fraser River. Paddlewheeler Riverboat Tours Never having seen the Fraser from anything but the shore I jumped at the chance.
The boat we took is the M.V. Native with it’s sole form of propulsion coming from its two paddle wheels. We started out at 9:30am briefly heading up river but turning around before the Skytrain bridge and leaving New Westminster behind. 
One of the first sights was the unloading of new vehicles onto Annacis island. Yes they are backing them off.
My Konica 1 rangefinder dates from around 1949, I doubt anyone 66 years gave any thought to it still being viable this far into the future. I can’t imagine any of my current digital cameras being useful beyond wedging a door open in half that length of time. But it is useful primarily because of its simplicity of design. Much like most folding medium format cameras the lens and shutter are autonomous in operation from the rest of the camera. A little island unto themselves. Because of this setting and tripping the shutter is independent of advancing the film. I use this fact to do multiple exposures and partial film advances. It seems to be a well suited niche for it. Without any type of built-in metering it is necessary to determine your exposure either with a light meter, guesstimating or my person favourite using a digital camera set to the same ISO as the film I am using. This not only can provide you with settings guidelines it allows a little bit of a compositional preview.
