Sketches and Studies by Craig Houghton

Craig Houghton April 21st, 2008

I received a camera and some lenses yesterday from EBay (great deal and Saturday delivery too). I am now the proud owner of a rather minty Minolta SR-T MC-II vintage 1973-75 SLR. I am fairly sure I had a Minolta metal body back in high school photo class, but it died after a 1994 mud wallow at Saugerties.

Also appearing: Kalmimar 1:3.5 35-70mm MC auto zoom, MC Rokkor-PG 1:1.4 50mm, Kiron 1:4 MC 80-200mm, and a Soligitor 2x teleconverter

So, it’s been a while since I fumbled around with manual focus or film. Here are some initial test shots. I wasn’t going for much, just a feel for what works. I’m just thankful anything came out. I have some half-decent film en route (Velvia slide), but these were taken with Walgreen’s very-own 400 speed 35mm color negative film.

Also, I still have to get my transparency adapter to work on my scanner so I can get a decent scan — these have been pulled off of the poorly compressed one-hour photo CD. Like I said, I am just (pleasantly) surprised anything developed.

most of these were taken with the Kiron 80-200mm lens and the teleconverter

a couple of grainy crops — some of it is probably from the high-speed film, but some of it is also from the low-res Walgreens compressed/sharpened scan

and Walgreens color negative 35mm film versus

my DSC-H1 digital

I am used to full manual control on my digital, but it was a blast to have no auto-focus. Although I need to get better scans, I am not unhappy with the results of the trial — I didn’t expect them to look like my usual digital photos, and I am glad they didn’t. Either way, it was great fun to look at the world through a viewfinder instead of squinting at a glared-over LCD.

Thanks for looking!

• photography