35mm Highlights
Some shots from my Minolta X300 & some thoughts on it as a camera because I don't have very much to say at the moment
Oops, look who meant to spend the past few months coming up with things to write up on here but got sidetracked by various tasks that probably shouldn’t have distracted him, and also he kind of forgot to come up with things to write about, meaning he just left his Substack/blog/random thoughts journal blank.
I have in all seriousness tried to think about topics for here, but I haven’t had anything to say of late. It’s been a busy time both personally and professionally, and so this has kind of fallen by the wayside.
In lieu of anything serious or worthwhile, here’s some nice pictures; and yes, I know this is treating Substack like its Tumblr1 but I think that’s what I want this to end up being. Plus, I don’t know, I think that’s the direction the platform is sort of heading in, a Tumblr that’s also not really a Tumblr, blogs that aren’t really just blogs but are also serious forms of journalism and artistic inquiry (categories which my entries don’t really fall into).
Anyhow, my Minolta X300 is a really nice camera. Released in the late 80s, its a simple little 35mm SLR camera. The only downside I can find is that the film advance lever can cause issues (a small bit of plastic can snap off and stop it advancing, which is a major pain and also something that apparently was common for all the Minolta X models so do be aware of that if its something you’re looking to purchase). The viewfinder on mine is stellar; large and clear, no haze or anything to obscure your view (a rarity even amongst well-kept and refurbished analogue cameras of all stripes). The lens is crisp and yet also has that softness I think people yearn for in analogue cameras; it’s not as nice as my Olympus OM lenses but it does operate a tad smoother and is a bit cleaner in its focusing.
All the below were taken on Kodak Gold 200, and developed locally by Conns Cameras in the centre of Dublin. As much as Kodak annoy me for their near-constant price rises due to their almost total monopoly over the colour film market, Gold 200 is as solid as it comes. Its an ever reliable workhorse of a film, and despite me missing Fujifilm’s higher ISO offerings, the latter’s 200ISO colour film has never really come close to matching what Kodak can do (indeed, for a while there was a rumour amongst analogue photography circles that Fuji’s C200 film was in fact being made by Kodak and was just a weaker/less warm formulation of Gold 200).
Thanks for reading, and I do genuinely think that, after the summer, I’ll have a bit more time to think and write about stuff on here (indeed, there may be some kind of ‘reflections’ post about that and the reasons for my not writing anything around the end of August, so please do stick around).
Maybe I should just dig out my old username & restart it. It does genuinely feel like people are wanting this sort of social media again, for better or worse.