n5jrn
Well-known
I forget the exact model, but it was one of the compact rangefinders Olympus came out with during the 70s.
This was in the early 80s and my Dad let me have it because (a) he had recently bought a new Minolta X-700, and (b) the metering circuitry had died on the Olympus, making it effectively an unmetered camera.
I shot several rolls of print film (both B/W and color) on it, and as I remember did just fine by following the exposure guides that were then printed on each box of film. Then I carelessly tossed my winter coat into the laundry without bothering to check the pockets, and guess what was in one of the front pockets? Maybe if it was a big SLR instead of a nice compact RF it would have been bulky enough to notice it....
And so began a series of camera misadventures that convinced me that I just had bad luck with cameras. It wasn't until my late thirties that I decided to give photography a try again.
That was when I bought a Minolta SLR, because I was about to embark on a month-long train trip and wanted to have pictures to remember it by. I sold within a year because I didn't like how Minolta had recently changed their lens mount, thus making it difficult or impossible to use inexpensive, used, manual-focus-era lenses. I bought a Pentax ZX-M (don't like autofocus, so why should I pay for it), started accumulating used Pentax glass, then got a sturdier mechanical MX as my main body, keeping the ZX-M as a second body. I still am pleased with my decision to build a Pentax SLR outfit.
Tried a DSLR, didn't like it (found both the camera and modern lenses made for it too big and bulky, hated how the need to support autofocus made it harder to manually focus, ran into strange firmware glitches nobody knew how to fix, etc.), sold it. Bought an Olympus XA, liked the compact size, found the rangefinder patch hard to see. Looked through the rangefinder window of a Barnack Leica in a camera store and instantly understood why people would pay so much money for a 50+-year-old camera with no meter and a somewhat fiddly film loading procedure.
This was in the early 80s and my Dad let me have it because (a) he had recently bought a new Minolta X-700, and (b) the metering circuitry had died on the Olympus, making it effectively an unmetered camera.
I shot several rolls of print film (both B/W and color) on it, and as I remember did just fine by following the exposure guides that were then printed on each box of film. Then I carelessly tossed my winter coat into the laundry without bothering to check the pockets, and guess what was in one of the front pockets? Maybe if it was a big SLR instead of a nice compact RF it would have been bulky enough to notice it....
And so began a series of camera misadventures that convinced me that I just had bad luck with cameras. It wasn't until my late thirties that I decided to give photography a try again.
That was when I bought a Minolta SLR, because I was about to embark on a month-long train trip and wanted to have pictures to remember it by. I sold within a year because I didn't like how Minolta had recently changed their lens mount, thus making it difficult or impossible to use inexpensive, used, manual-focus-era lenses. I bought a Pentax ZX-M (don't like autofocus, so why should I pay for it), started accumulating used Pentax glass, then got a sturdier mechanical MX as my main body, keeping the ZX-M as a second body. I still am pleased with my decision to build a Pentax SLR outfit.
Tried a DSLR, didn't like it (found both the camera and modern lenses made for it too big and bulky, hated how the need to support autofocus made it harder to manually focus, ran into strange firmware glitches nobody knew how to fix, etc.), sold it. Bought an Olympus XA, liked the compact size, found the rangefinder patch hard to see. Looked through the rangefinder window of a Barnack Leica in a camera store and instantly understood why people would pay so much money for a 50+-year-old camera with no meter and a somewhat fiddly film loading procedure.
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