Some more photos from my rediscovered Minox 35ML. It’s a fun camera to use, and can deliver excellent results, but the relatively time consuming hassles of buying, developing and scanning film have to be taken into account. All of these taken around and about in Ticino, on kodak BW400CN film.

Also, I’m experimenting with linking photos to Flickr rather than hosting them myself, since Flickr will do so for free.  For this purpose I have created a second Flickr account, as I don’t want to mix these up with my main account.  Let’s see how it goes…

Many, many years ago I owned a little camera called a Minox ML. At some point it developed some kind of defect. I went to a shop in London to buy a replacement, new, rather than secondhand, to take on a trip to Venezuela. The shop manager persuaded me instead to buy a new-fangled camera called a Ricoh GR, which had just come on the market. I did so, and that Ricoh - the first camera I ever bought new - pretty much introduced me to high quality photography. I must still have had some regard for the Minox though, because at some I did get it fixed. But then it sort of got forgotten. In fact when I tried to find it a few months ago, with no luck, I assumed I must have discarded it or given it away at some point.  Until two weeks ago when I found it quietly nestled up in a corner of a cupboard.

Of course the 6V battery was dead, and the battery type is very hard to find. I managed to cobble together a battery using 4 1.5V cells, which seems to work fine.  I’ve also now found a couple of PX28 batteries, from the wonderful Foto Moderna in Siena, one of the last real camera shops I know of anywhere in the world.

And the camera works fine.  I loaded it up with a test roll of Kodak BW400CN, and soon got into the swing of things. It’s interesting comparing it with the Olympus XA I acquired a few months ago. Both have very good f/2.8 35mm lenses, both have built-in exposure meters, but the XA has a rangefinder while the Minox just has distance scale focussing. Actually, I don’t find that the XA’s rangefinder is that much use, and the Minox’s focus ring is much more practical than the XA’s lever. Same goes for the aperture ring versus the XA’s slider. As for image quality, well I’d need to use the same film in both, but my feeling is they are either pretty much equal, or the Minox is a little sharper. Either way it’s a bit late for a side-by-side test! But I find the Minox more fun.  It really is unbelievably compact, and robust … and, hey, “full frame”!

Here’s a couple of shots. You’d never get the dynamic range in the second one on any digital camera I own.

Fooling around with old cameras isn’t going to make my photography any better, but, well, it’s a lot cheaper than fooling around with new cameras!

It’s remarkable how much this strange hobby / profession of photography is dominated by equipment when in theory it should be about creativity. Such a huge amount of time and energy spent obsessing about rumours of new gear, arguing about it when it is released, buying it (on credit), discarding it soon after for the next new thing, and yet the actual impact on the presumed end result - photographs - is actually minor if not zero. That new Wonderblitz X-Pro-1000 Titanium with its 30 Megapixels will show AWESOME sharpness and DOF at pixel level… but actually, nobody cares except the owner. Not even even other photographers, less they feel insecure with their 29 Mpix X-Pro-999. And for everybody else who might be persuaded to look, well it’s still a pretty dull photo of a cat. The whole subculture just seems to be an extended, extreme form of retail therapy. And therapy of some kind seems to be desperately needed by the denizens of the rumour site, 43rumors.com, which just leaked photos of the long promised miracle machine from Olympus which will merge the (big, heavy) four thirds system with the (small, light, but a bit limited) micro four thirds system. The comments on those posts could provide material for at least several psychology PhDs.

Which is a very long-winded way of getting to the point of what is, in fact a post about gear. It’s really a pity that this partial information has been leaked, devoid of any context or presentation from Olympus. The camera looks quite interesting, although the design seems crippled by a brief to make it look “retro”. I guess retro sells, but I’m not convinced it is a good idea in this case. This rumoured OM-D E-M1 looks too big for micro four thirds lenses, and too small for four thirds lenses. All in all it looks like what the French describe as a “usine a gaz” - a gasworks. A bunch of components loosely held together with knobs and dials seemingly at random all over the place. The silky smooth, mould-breaking ergonomics of Olympus’ fabulous E-1 are a distant memory these days. But anyway, it still deserves to be presented as the manufacturer intended, not by some sleazy rumour mongerer, out to snare clicks on his adverts.

But these days I’m only really tempted by gear that can help me make photography significantly better or easier. By better I mean that it opens up opportunities, not that it provides 2 squillion megapixels on the head of a pin, and AWESOME IQ at ISO 3245643000. One of the key features of my Olympus E-5 is the rugged, fully orientable swivel screen, which lets me make otherwise near-impossible compositions. The new camera, apparently, loses that feature. Of course it adds all sorts of check-list features, like HD video - which, c’mon, NOBODY really uses, and other fluff.

One of my favourite photos from Iceland, and one that would have been pretty mudh impossible without the unique (at that time) swivel screen / live view combination of the Olympus E-3

More and more I’m finding that new gear releases just make me value what I already own more. And that photographers who I actually admire would be bored to tears, or just baffled, by this post.

I’ve had an absolute headache from hell today - still got it - so I’m going to make myself feel better with a good mindless rant. Here goes.

The never-ending cycle of new camera releases marches onwards, and fuels the ongoing mindless squabbles in vast swathes of internet fora where self-appointed pundits viciously attack each other for daring to have a positive view on a camera made by another tribe, er, sorry, company. Is there any other object, or topic, which drives such futile passion? This year’s camera is inevitably lauded as being unbelievably superior to last year’s (well, assuming it doesn’t cross tribal boundaries), while last year’s, which was, of course, a revelation over it’s predecessor, cannot even be used to take photographs now, or so it seems. And of course this years’ best-ever-camera will be sneered upon as useless junk in under 9 months. One wonders to what extent camera companies stoke this stuff on forums, after all it all works out pretty well for them. I found out a few minutes ago that my Olympus E-5 is the worst digital camera you can buy, which came as a shock. I have to confess that the several thousand photos I took with it back in January are probably far from excellent - but at the same time, I never once felt they would be any better with a different camera.

Hopeless photo taken last weekend with useless camera (Olympus E-P3). No shadow detail. Blown highlights. No DOF. Really hopeless. Must ask internet forums which new camera to buy

Very few of these warring snapshooters actually seem to take any photos. Those that do get shown are almost always banal to the point of comedy. Endless shots of nothing in particular at 256,000 ISO, or at f0.95, of cats, kid shots that only a mother (or expensive camera-owning father) could love, or dull closeups of flowers. And more f***ing cats.

And the noise is deafening.

Even on the more hip side of the scale, it seems these days that it cannot have been conceivable to take a decent photo without a Fuji X series camera (although they’re pretty quiet about the XS-1 and XF-1. I wonder why). Even Michael Reichmann has got in on that particular act, which may well dismay some of the hipper of the hippest. But this, I’m sorry to say, takes the absolute biscuit. “Choices need to be made, however heartbreaking” … “Safe travels little one” - Retch! It’s a sodding camera, fercrissakes. I do generally like Patrick LaRoque’s blog, and his stream-of-consciousness albeit rather affected photography, so I’m praying he’s being ironic. There is some vague hope, he’s Canadian, not American, but not much I fear.

The interesting thing is, when you actually see some good photography, and an interview of the artist touches upon gear, as it seems it must, in the vast majority of cases it turns out that they use boring old Canons and Nikons. Canon 5Ds seem particularly popular. And when I ask acquaintances of mine why they use these cameras, rather than some hip new Fuji, pretty Olympus, or tech-overkill Sony, the answer tends to be a bit boring. Basically, the killer feature is that they are ubiquitous, you can get good service and emergency spares pretty much anywhere in the world, you can get just about any lens or accessory you can think of, they “just work”, oh, and they’ve got pretty good image quality. The last point tends, indeed, to come last, because these days it’s pretty much a given. Hell, even my much aligned Olympus E-5 has quite good enough image quality for 99% of cases.

And then they just go out and concentrate on making great photos. And they stay away from nerdy forums. And they’ve never heard of most “new” cameras - they already know what they’ll buy when the current one finally wears out. By which time they’ll be making even better photos.

Time to get off the treadmill I think.

Well, well, look what DHL dropped off yesterday. A brand new Lomography Belair “Belairgon” 114mm lens, apparently hand machined from a solid block of aluminium by Zenith in Russia.

The packaging is quite impressive, and the lens is built like, well, something Russian. It’s quite hefty, and apart from back lens cap, which is standard Lomography low grade plastic sh*t, generally it gives a good impression. Very firm but fluid movement, well put together. Unfortunately, the companion viewfinder is of the same type as the standard Belair lenses, so absolutely hopeless. Actually, it’s worse, as for some incomprehensible reasons the hipster designers have coloured it some virulent shade of orangey-red on the inside, which reflects in the (dim and blurry) view. Awesome.

So, first impressions, without having actually used it yet, are of a lens built to a standard way above the body it fits on to. Next step will be to see if it can actually rescue the Belair by delivering some decent photos.

Personally I find “Zenith. Russia” far sexier than “Lomography”....

The focus scale is far more useful than the one on the plastic lenses. Due to the Belair design, there are only 2 aperture settings, f/8 and f/16, which is fairly useless. Coupled with the lack of any manual exposure setting, there is a strong element of chance with any Belair shot, which I suppose is what “lomography” is all about. But “spray and pray” gets pretty expensive when you’re dealing with 120 format film.