Kodachrome was a superb fine-grained colour slide film made in various speeds from 1935-2010. At this point the combination of falling demand and the fact that the k-14 process was somewhat toxic resulted in it being discontinued. This was my last roll of Kodachrome 64 shot with a Minolta Dynax 800Si camera and 24mm, 28-135mm […]
It is often assumed that because the stars only come out at night, taking photographs of them must be difficult and require very specialised and expensive equipment. In fact this is not the case and with advances in technology even relatively ordinary cameras can produce images that only a decade or two ago would have
Back in 2012 my photography was at a crossroads. I was really using three sorts of camera. I had my full Sony DSLR-A700 system with a bag of lenses, mostly the Sony 16-105mm zoom and a collection of classic Minolta lenses made for film. Indeed I almost had the whole set of mainstream lenses as
One of the joys of using the Micro Four-Thirds system is that the flange distance – ie the distance from the lens mount to the sensor – is only 19.5mm. Most SLR systems designed to fit a moving mirror into this space have flange distances in the 40-50mm range. This means it is very easy
In days of old this would have been considered a moderate wide-angle with a field of view significantly wider than the “standard” 50mm but not quite out there with the 24mm and 28mm optics that would be considered “proper” wide-angles. Of course the crop factor changes all this and mounted on an M43 body this
This lens was one of those introduced by Minolta in 1985 when they launched the 7000 AF – the first SLR with in-body Auto-Focus. These lenses were all very sharp and very well built, and of course Minolta’s mastery of colour was well established by this point. This one has a full 1:1 macro mode
This was a camera that I quite fancied when it was new in 2005, but it was quite expensive at that time – £800, and I had my sights set on Minolta’s long awaited DSLR, the Dynax 5D. I already had a set of lenses for the D5D as it used a Minolta A mount
This was my Zoom Compact camera in the late 1990s. Towards the end of the film era the previous generation of fixed focal range compact cameras gave way to the zoom compact due to consumer demand for a bit more reach, and indeed some wider angle coverage too. However doing this whilst keeping the camera
This was my compact camera in the 1980s when I was travelling a lot with work, so it has been to India and much of Europe, also Cyprus, Israel, Cairo and various holidays to Greece and Turkey. It pre-dates the compact zoom designs and has a fixed focal 35mm f2.8 lens which is very sharp,
This is a camera that was made in the LOMO factory in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in the USSR about 50 years ago. I used to have one of these in my teens and it got passed down to a cousin, but a few years ago I picked up a mint example from ebay for
This of course used to be the only way of doing photography until the digital revolution came along around the turn of the Century. I put my first toe in the water in 1997 with the purchase of a Kodak DC210 which was not cheap and by modern standards wasn’t very good either. But it
