SLR

SLR Outfit...

As you may know, I've had several abortive attempts at getting a 35mm SLR camera outfit together. Eventually, I decided to go back to basics and build an outfit based on my Centon DF300 body, a Chinese copy of Minolta's X300 from the mid 90s - and where are Minolta cameras made now? Yep, China! I bought the camera in 1995, used it once and put it away - I can't remember, now, exactly why.

Anyway, to the body I've added some secondhand bits, so far - I lucked into a half-price sale on Minolta MD-mount kit here - a 70-230mm Sun zoom lens, in virtually perfect condition, for £15 (this had several layers of labels that showed it started it's secondhand life at £49, a T2 connector to connect the body directly to my scope (with an adapter) - this normally costs £15, new, elsewhere, I paid £1 (label history shows it was originally £10), and a 3x Sirius teleconverter, £7.50, mint, with label history showing an original price of £25 (this will ramp up the zoom to a hefty maximum telephoto of 690mm). I did wonder how on earth I was going to focus the thing at that magnification, but as everything will be at the infinity setting - we're talking subjects100-200 or so yards away - it doesn't much matter. Anything closer, I'll whip off the teleconverter and revert to a normal zoom. Or grab my digital.

Today, May 24, I've added a 200mm prime lens, as covered in the Birding Blog. This cost me a tenner, label history, though, shows it was previously £40. Coupled with the 3x teleconverter, it will give me a brighter image than the zoom would, making it easier to focus (Note - in use, this is, in fact, a real bugger to focus), with a loss of 90mm on the focal length, which seems a fair trade-off. I just wish I had more spare cash while this sale is on - I'd really like a 35-70mm short zoom; coupled with the 70-230mm zoom, the two lenses would cover all eventualities, and the thought occurs to me that, had I not gone to the pub yesterday, I could have had one. Ah well...

Bad news: I've accidentally scratched the mirror in the Centon, which will probably adversely affect exposure measurement, so I've had to track down a replacement body. I found a body, a Minolta X-700, one of the best of their manual focus cameras, then I thought I might as well go the whole hog, and get a 50mm, f1.7 lens to go with it while the lens sale was still on, and this is the result:-

Can't really afford it but what the hell... Info on the camera here for those interested. The lens and camera came today. The camera, while well used, is sound and, as far as I can tell, everything works, and the lens is a Rokkor, the brand name before Minolta imposed their own brand name,and although it's a 50mm, f1.7, as above, the design is somewhat different. The first thing I have to do is put a film through the camera, to make sure everything is as it should be. Note: I've since found out that the scratches are unlikely to affect the exposure - oh well, now I've got two cameras!

This is an excellent site for anyone interested in Minolta's family of manual-focus cameras and lenses.

To cart all this around, I've bough a Hama Track Pack, a photographer's rucksack. This retails at £78 on Amazon - I paid £17.99 at 7dayshop.com.

So, some pics:-

Zoom lens, camera body, T2 ring and the teleconverter.

200mm Telephoto lens, with lens hood extended. Apologies for it being out of proportion - taken with my digital compact, the image quality isn't good enough to tinker with it too much, other than improving the contrast. It's a good image for the naming of parts, though, for those of you unfamiliar with SLRs. On the left, the bright silver section is the camera mounting ring, the duller silver is the base of the lens body, next is the aperture scale (the black tab to the left engages with the camera's exposure meter). The red dot is the aperture scale index mark. Next is the depth of focus scale (also called depth of field), this shows how much of the image (in feet or metres), is in focus at a given aperture (some cameras or lenses have a stop-down button, to close down the lens to its taking aperture - the viewing aperture is always maximum - so you can see the effect in the viewfinder). The large, milled ring is the focus ring, calibrated in feet (orange), and metres (white). Lastly, the lens hood, which keeps extraneous light off the front element of the lens. (Note: light impinging on the front element, and reflecting off the internal elements, creates bright, circular images, and is responsible for more photos of "flying saucers" than almost anything else.

Camera body, 3x teleconverter and 70-230mm zoom lens.

Hama Track Pack Rucksack.

Packed with my kit.

Sorry it's not too clear - black kit in a black bag doesn't show up too well! From the top in the pic (right-hand side in reality), we have the 200mm telephoto lens,tucked into a pocket made with a movable divider, down the centre is the SLR with the 70-230mm zoom attached, bottom row (l-r), 3x teleconverter, though all you can see is the protective cap, a box containing the T2 ring, my Fuji S602 zoom digital camera and, in the lid, a film container holding spare batteries, and a couple of spare lens/body caps. My digital compact, not shown, took the pic.

This also takes my digital camera, so everything can be kept in one place. To be perfectly honest, a shoulder bag would have been more convenient in use, but anything with this sort of capacity was way beyond my budget.

At first, the weight of the camera plus either the zoom or 200mm lens was worrying - at over 3lb it was more than I could cope with. Luckily, my muscles adjusted quickly, and it wasn't the problem I thought it was going to be.

One thing's struck me about these three pieces of kit - the lenses and the teleconverter - and that's what excellent examples of engineering they are - apart from the glass lens elements, everything is metal, not a smidgen of plastic in them. Well, there's probably some nylon or Delrin bushes, or sliders, hidden inside somewhere, as you can't use lubricant in lenses in case it gets on to the glass.

I don't know how old they are, as the Minolta MD lens fitting spanned several decades, but I suspect they come from the eighties at least (the design seems to confirm this, but I won't bore you with the details - they could date from the seventies or the nineties, but I think eighties is more likely, based on overall condition), and their robust, plastic-free construction, and simple design are the reasons why they still work as well now as they did when they were new. I very much doubt that the hyper-sophisticated, auto-everything, electrically powered, but above all, plastic-bodied lenses that are the norm today will survive as long.

I wonder, too, how long it'll take people to realise that the most important part of the photo-taking process is - or, at least, should be - the person holding the camera? Digital sales have dropped off, so either the market is saturated, which seems unlikely, or people are finding that just pressing a button and leaving the rest to the camera is, somehow, unsatisfying. I certainly found it so.

Also, as I've said elsewhere, an SLR has 4 basic controls - focus, aperture, shutter speed and, if fitted, zoom - that's what mine has. My Fuji digital has somewhere around a hundred variables - I lost count, and the will to live, around 70 - but there were plenty still to go! That, by any standards, is way too many. If a manufacturer was brave enough to produce a digital SLR, with interchangeable lenses, and just those four basic functions, I think it would be a runaway success - anything else you need to tweak, or tinker with, the image can be found in Photoshop - you don't need it in the camera as well. I will concede that there are some users for whom an immediate, pre-processed, finished image is essential (journalists, for example), but for most users, that's not essential, it's just gratification.

I'm not a Luddite, I think auto-exposure is essential, and auto-focus extremely useful - everything else is down the to the photographer's own skill, or at least, it should be. These days the quality of the resulting image is likely to owe more to the skill of the camera designer than to the photographer, but that's entirely the wrong way round, and one reason I've gone back to film. It's much the same reason why some people drive open-top sports cars from the sixties - it takes real skill and application to get the best out of the equipment. Also, when you have to make every shot count, as when using film, you develop an eye for a good composition and/or lighting effect, whereas most digital users just blaze away, hoping that the law of averages will apply, and out of their hundreds of shots, some may be worthwhile.

Snobbery? No, I don't believe so - it's about taking pleasure in exercising total control over a process, using acquired skills well, and knowing that, whether the end product is brilliant or rubbish, the praise or the blame is entirely mine. And I wonder just how many photographers these days, in, say, their 30s, with their all-singing, all dancing, auto-everything digital cameras, and never having used film, have even heard of, for example, differential focusing?

It's a technique in which you use a wide aperture to create a shallow depth of field, so that only the subject in the photograph is in pin-sharp focus, and everything else is out of focus - very effective for portraits, for example, or anything else where you don't want other elements in the picture to distract attention from the subject - but it needs manual control to achieve perfectly, and how many actually know how to do that? Tip: set your camera for aperture-priority exposure and manual focus - and practice. It's not impossible to do this with auto-focus, but isn't it better to exercise a little independence, and not let machines do everything for you?

If you go online, you'll find lots of review pages, and forums, stuffed with whiny posts from people who can't get to grips with their digital camera, and make it do what they want it to. The answer to most problems is simply RTFM**, but many are directly linked to ignorance of the photographic process, which is essentially the same digitally as it is with film - what is radically different is the means of recording the image. That's not to say everyone who used film was an expert - the introduction of APS film and point-and-shoot compact cameras showed that many lacked even the skill to load the film - but anyone who used a 35mm SLR, no matter how sophisticated it was, couldn't help but acquire at least a basic knowledge of how things worked.

Finally, film provides something that digital doesn't - an archive. Digital photos are ephemeral, leaving nothing for future generations - film, properly stored, will last for many years.

**Read The F***ing Manual!