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pandas and old Minolta cameras

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Today we went to see the Panda at an aquarium. The pandas gave these plaintive looks, trying to tell us they just don't swim.

Well that's a lie. But there were pandas at an aquarium-themed amusement park run by a group calling themselves a conservancy. Good enough for us, and certainly good enough for Kenny.

While in the second panda exhibit, I noticed a woman with a Minolta XG7, a venerable film camera from the same era as my old XD's. I stopped and chatted with her, surprised to see someone else with an old film camera in this day and age of DSLR's.

She had no idea how to use the thing, nor whether it even worked. It turned out that she'd simply picked it off of a shelf in the office. The shelf where they keep .. props. She was wearing the old camera simply to look more like the tourists.

But when I showed her that the camera still functioned, and how she could replace the film, she got interested in using the thing. I wish her well: the lens was so dirty I didn't offer one of my lens cleaner papers, it was going to need a lot more help; also, the aperture lever on the camera that responds when you adjust the aperture ring barely moved when I tried opening and shutting the aperture. It moved with a sluggishness that suggests a mingling of dust and oil inside the body. Yikes.

I guess this use of old film cameras is now bordering on the eccentric.