365cameras.com

I’ve never mentioned it here. It never came up before, but I’m a Minolta lover.

The Minolta X-700 was the first camera I purchased once I got out of high school and didn’t have access to the Pentax cameras I first used. It was a beauty. It had a very nice, bright Acute-Matte screen. Good feel. Very nice glass. It wasn’t long before I just instinctively knew how to spin the f-stop ring and the shutter speed dial. It was and is still a part of me.

I still have that X-700 and I still love it. I’ve taken untold thousands of pictures on it without really any problems. I think I finally may have a scratch on my pressure plate and I don’t know how I did it. So, I’m checking out brand new (to me) 20-30 year old Minolta bodies to add to the collection. My local photo store doesn’t have these very often. Of course, I’ve been to ebay. What an amazing place to shop.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, I had to spend a few hours reading Minolta information a couple nights ago. I ended up on The Rokkor Files, www.rokkorfiles.com and realized I had never written about it. I love this site.

So what’s so great about it. First, it was built by someone with a love for Minolta. (Sadly, it seems he converted most of his gear to digital for his wedding photography business, but that’s another matter.)

Secondly, it is a fantastic resource. It has a guide to all the manual focus Minolta cameras, the lenses, accessories, advertising, and technical reports. There are links to purchase manuals for most Minolta photography equipment. It also has a brief but good links page. There are articles from Dick Sullivan’s SRT Resources. And if that isn’t enough, there is even a downloadable Minolta font.

So if you have a Minolta manual focus film camera, this is a great resource. If you don’t have a Minolta camera, why not? Get one. Like all film cameras these days, prices are down. Quality is extremely high. This is a great time to be picking up cameras you might have never owned. I have my eye on that cute little number over there. No her size isn’t 36-24-36. It’s XD11. And I think she’s looking at me.

Classic Minolta 35mm SLRs

Minolta 35mm SLR Lenses

Minolta Rangefinders

OK, well as a film photography guy, I’m a little paranoid about old cameras breaking and I’m more paranoid about who is going to fix these things in the future. It seems like with digital, you know it’s going to break or become obsolete so at this point, plan on replacing them periodically.

But with film, hopefully we can hang on to our cameras much longer. Some are timeless beauties. And hopefully, there will always be people around who know how to fix them correctly.

I am going to begin listing people on this site who do camera repair if I see that they have a good overall track record on the web.

So the first of these is Sherrie Krauter. I’ve seen her referred to many times as a reputable repair person and dealer of Leica Cameras.

Now about that Leica MP that I ***must*** have…

Leica i, ii, iii, iiic, iiif on eBay

Leica M2, M3, M4, M6, M7, MP on eBay

Do you need to learn how to use your collectible old camera?

Find old camera manuals here.

The site also has manuals for flashes and lightmeters