Day 216—The Past Is Prologue

This past Monday, my dear friends Chris and Susan gave me a Minolta SR-T101 SLR film camera that had belonged to Chris’s late father. I was thrilled to be the recipient of this old SLR because I have been thinking about trying my hand at film photography even though Kodachrome is no longer being manufactured. This Minolta model was produced for about ten years between 1966 and 1975. It came with a 200mm 3.5 Zoom lens, a 35mm f/2.8 lens and the kit lens is a 58mm f/1.4 so it appears I have some nice, fast lenses. My preliminary research shows that this camera features full aperture metering, which automatically compensates for the speed of the lens fitted on the camera and according to one website’s information, it is a feature that took Nikon twelve more years to figure out how to accomplish.

This is a photo of the body with the kit lens attached. My digital camera picks up so much detail that dust particles I hadn’t noticed when I took the photograph show prominently on the edges of the lens. The camera and its lenses need a thorough cleaning so I rendered it in black and white, added grain and a vignette to give it period feel and to camouflage some of the dust and dirt.