The 100mm f2.8 AF macro lens was one of my earliest purchases. At the time, my focus was on documenting my garden. I wanted nice flower pics, and the only lens I owned was an AF 50mm 1.7. The 7000i that I had recently bought came with twoContinue Reading
My first Semi P had a non-original viewfinder. I searched for a year or so for a cheap donor and, having found one, tried to do the replacement. It didn’t work out because my working Semi P had been altered in more ways than I thought and attaching theContinue Reading
The 7sII is a gem, definitely a keeper. If not for the VMLP, I would never have tried one, but I am so glad I did. Before the 7sIl, I had only used a rangefinder once, my father-in-law’s Leica, which was probably an M3. I did not like theContinue Reading
If you spend enough time reading about Minolta gear, you will eventually come across a reference to crossed “XX” gear. This is a thing for Minolta collectors—not a major thing, but a thing nonetheless. When Minolta released the Maxxum line of cameras for the North American market, itContinue Reading
Minolta went crazy with “si” models. There seem to be more of them than any other AF line by far. By my count, there were 15 main models with additional variations of some of those. The XTsi arrived in 1998 and seems to be the more advanced of the laterContinue Reading
Back in the 1980s, I dreamed of owning a Minolta 7000i. At the time, it was far beyond my budget, so I never got one. In February 2019, after deciding I wanted a film camera to record my garden, the first camera I looked for was a Minolta MaxxumContinue Reading
Once I added manual focus cameras to the VMLP, I had to decide which lenses to explore. Initially, I settled on zooms because I had the standard 50mm lenses, and prime SR lenses were more expensive than the AF lenses I used. Once I had a decent collectionContinue Reading
The XE-5 and XE-7 intrigued me because they were part of the Minolta-Leica collaboration, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. My first XE-5 was a Goodwill buy. It arrived with a good 50mm f2 lens, but the film advance was stuck. Fortunately, a little tinkering resultedContinue Reading
The “Back to Film” wave continues to move along, and as it does, it’s bringing back into use cameras set aside for their digital successors. The last film cameras I remember from the late 1980s and early 1990s were inexpensive, disposable P&S cameras. We used these a lot, taking picturesContinue Reading
It had to happen eventually. Five years of reading photography blogs and magazines extolling the virtues of Leica cameras and lenses (and knowing of the Minolta-Leica collaboration) made me want to try Minolta’s Leica-inspired offering. I have used a Leica, and that initial experience was not a favorableContinue Reading
