Sometime last year, I went on a bit of an eBay dive and bought some vintage Minolta cameras1. I meant to try some film photography, but never got around to getting the actual films and messing around with the cameras to see which actually worked. No regrets though, despite how I haven’t used those cameras.
Before getting those cameras, my interest in Minolta was primarily because a user in my small circle of people I “knew” had the username “minolta” and it just sounded cute to me, hence the name recognition and fond emotions I had associated with the name2. I only found out when I was looking for vintage cameras how big of a name Minolta was to photography.
During that eBay dive last year3, I had gotten an extra Minolta lens in addition to the cameras, and it came with a lens converter for Sony E (It was really NEX). After I initially got it, I did play around briefly with it, but since I was more interested in using my fancier automatic E lenses, I didn’t keep it on my camera too long. Recently though, when I was trying to find some other lenses to maybe buy, I remembered my old Minolta lenses and decided to do some proper experimenting.
One of the reasons I didn’t stay long with the vintage lenses was how heavy it was compared to my newer lens. This time though, I just tried to not let that distract me from actually using it.
The lens that originally came with the NEX adapter was a Minolta MC Rokkor-X PF 50mm f/2, so these photos were taken with that in night lighting late around 11pm to 1am with max aperture.
It has a 55mm filter size, which unfortunately isn’t the size of the rest of my lenses (my Sony lenses have a front filter size of 49mm4), so I decided to swap the lens with one of the kit lenses on one of the vintage Minolta cameras (X-9) that was 49mm. This was one of the newer Minolta MD 50mm f/2 lenses (not Rokkor5), but it allowed me to use some of my existing filters. So I attached a Y2 yellow filter for some B&W photos while stuck with night lighting.
A comparison with the B&W mode turned off:
These were much better photos than what I took when I first got these vintages lenses. In the interim from the time I got them to now, the lens I primarily use is the Sony E 20mm f/2.8 lens, and I had started playing around with it in manual mode more. Doing more manual focusing helped a lot with how comfortable I felt using the Minolta lenses, especially since the focus assist magnifier feature didn’t work with the older lenses. I mostly just had to “know” what I wanted was in focus instead of being able to see with the focus magnifier immediately.
The next day, I came back to the same scene experiment, but under much better natural day lighting.
I don’t know if I’d dare take it out on a trip, since it’s so heavy and no where near the convenience of my 20mm pancake lens, but I think I would like to try one day. Using the manual focus is way more “fun” than relying on auto focus. The obvious drawback is the loss of speed, but I think the slower intentionality aspect will probably have a different satisfaction reward.
For now though, the only subjects I have access to are my decorations.
I enjoyed playing around with this lens so much I returned to my eBay dive and bought two more lenses: a 28mm f/2.8 and a 135mm 2/3.5.
Footnotes
- The cameras I managed to win the bids on that were pretty cheap are: Minolta X-9, SRT 201, and 7000 Maxxium. ↩︎
- It was an icon maker on LJ lol. ↩︎
- Actually, all of my lenses were bought used off eBay, except the kit zoom lens that came with my Sony ZV-E10. I barely use the zoom kit lens and if I have one regret, it’s getting the camera with the zoom lens. ↩︎
- Since the Sony E 20mm pancake lens I got had a front filter size of 49mm, I’ve since tried to only get other lenses that have that filter size to save myself from having to deal with step-up rings or more filter sizes. ↩︎
- I know the whole debate over the Rokkor lenses and the quality difference, but for my purposes I’m not too concerned. If you do want to know which generation each lens is from, this page is a great reference. ↩︎
