camera gear
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I've been doing a lot of photography recently. First of all, having a baby around is a sure-fire film consumer. But more than that, I've been making the most of the old Minolta gear that I've been amassing over the past two decades. I have a handful of lenses and no fewer than three camera bodies.
I've slowly settling into a favourite combination of lenses. If I'm just wandering around the city on my own -- running errands or going to work -- I carry the 35mm lens. I find it a really versatile and easy-to-use field of view, wide enough to take in typical urban scenes, but not so wide that small things get lost.
As for more purposeful photographic outings, I like to take three complimentary lenses: 20mm, 50mm and 100mm.
The first is primarily a landscape tool, presenting a very wide angle without too much distortion. It's also a good catch-all, useful in capturing a scene in context, or the full view of some mid-sized subject (such as a statue or shop) when confined to close range. It's also great for providing some creative views of everyday scenes, in that the dimensions it provides are significantly different from the way the human eye captures things.
The 50mm lens was for many years the 'standard', closely matching the way that the human eye sees things while offering some versatility (e.g. framing small things like an interesting window to isolating a few landscape elements). I find myself using this more than the 20mm lens.
Lastly is the 100mm lens. Typical of portrait photography as much as anything else, this lens is great for picking out street scenes, and is useful in capturing wildlife in its habitat. I find that I use this more and more frequently of late, especially in capturing my wife with the child as we go about doing something.
With the Minolta gear I use, all three lenses are small and lightweight. The 20mm lens is a hard one to find, even now that Minolta has left the photography business, but the 50mm lens is easy to find very cheap (it was the standard lens sold with camera bodies for decades) and the 100mm f/2.5 was a reasonably common portraiture lens.
As for bodies, I've decided that the XD-11 is head and shoulders above the other two cameras I've got -- both X-700's. The X-700 is sometimes cited as the best body that Minolta built, and it certainly is packed with features. But the XD-11 has the one critically-important feature that the X-700 lacks -- a sophisticated meter.
With the XD-11, which meters light reflected off of the film, I consistently get beautifully exposed shots. In combination with the Ilford black and white film I prefer (FP4 Plus 125 and HP5 Plus 400) I get results much beyond what I can expect from the X-700. In fact, I much prefer to use that combination than I do any of my film or digital cameras.
Today I got to put it all to good use, because we went to see the sakura blossoms around the Imperial Palace grounds. With three of us to juggle the baby and all of the attendant gear (carriage, diaper bag, etc) I was able to splurge a bit with the load and even bring my tripod. It was good fun.
