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March 17, 2010 | 0 Comments

Photography Site of the day – www.suaudeau.eu

I found a very nice photography site, www.suaudeau.eu. The only stumbling point for me is that it’s in French. My knowledge of French is not so good. Wait a minute. Don’t leave yet. Google makes it easy to see a translated copy of a site.

The translated www.suaudeau.eu home page.

There is some really excellent content here, such as this guide to Minolta cameras

That page has individual pages for particular Minolta models. It has history of Minolta SLR and rangefinder cameras. It also has repair tips, lens disassembly instructions, and finder changing instructions for the SRT 101.

The histories are excellent. I like the Minolta Manual SLR history.

Check out these Camera, Shutter and Flash Service Manuals
There are service or user manuals for Leica 2M, Leica 3f, Minolta Himatic 7Sii, Minolta XD-11, Minolta X-700, Minolta X300, Minolta X500, Minolta XE, Minolta 360XP, Minolta SRT 101, Nikon F3, Compur, Pentax K1000, Pentax Spotmatic, Pentax Spotmatic II, Canon EF, Canon EOS 30, Canon EOS 500, Canon F1, Canon Canonet GIII QL 17, Obturateur Prontor 1, Obturateur Prontor 2, Olympus XA, Yashica D, Yashica Mat 124 G, Yashica Electro 35
The caveat is that not all of the manuals have English translations in them.

Along with the manuals, there is a very nice Repair page

This site is well worth checking out, especially for the service manuals and repair section. If you’re a Minolta person especially, there is some great stuff here. Highly recommended.

Please note that if google comes back and says a page is too big to translate, such as the manuals, then just view the page without the translator. Most of the links I provided are for the translations by google.

September 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

How To Inexpensively Expand Your 35mm Lens Collection with Lens Adapters

Shhhh. Here’s a secret we don’t want everyone to know.

You can use inexpensive older lenses with new cameras. Maybe even lenses and cameras from different manufacturers.

Yep. Just get an adapter.

Here’s a video with someone adapting a beautiful old Minolta Rokkor 50mm 1.4 lens to a Canon EOS 5D. There’s no sound. But there doesn’t really need to be.

You can also find adapters that will allow you to use old screw mount lenses with most cameras. How beautiful is that? Got a beautiful old Super Takumar SMC that you want to use on an old school Minolta XD-11 or the upcoming Canon EOS 7D or a Nikon D700? Get an adapter.

Here’s one of a Jupiter M42 screw mount lens being used with a Pentax K Mount camera.

Since new digital camera bodies may be bank busters for you, and you might have thought you couldn’t afford a camera system, now you can get some good old glass or use the camera lenses you already have with your new body.

Caveats, well, yeah, of course. So some adapters might not allow focus to infinity. You might need 42mm for Pentax and 39mm for Leica, but that’s not that hard to figure out. Some lenses might run too deep and hit your mirror. That would be a no-no. Oh and worst yet for the modern picture taker, your auto everything mode probably won’t work so you might have to use that thinking thing that’s on top of your neck and use it in manual mode. Oh the horrors.

In any case, there are some wonderful old lenses in most people’s houses that aren’t being used. Just don’t tell everyone our secret. I like buying old lenses cheap. Then again, I’ll probably use the film camera that goes with it.

Here are some searches that will get you started.

M39 Adapters on ebay