Me and Photography (part 4) - The Minolta Era

The Zenit, Exacta and Fujica were the first SLRs I came to use. But none of them I owned. I was already well into my twenties when I finally became the proud owner of single-lens reflex camera. Santa Claus came with an almost cube-shaped package containing a Minolta SRT 100. I hadn’t expected anything of this magnitude, so I was surprised and overjoyed. These - after all - were lean student years. The brand name didn’t strike much of a bell though. From the photo-art and photo-journalistic books I kept hauling home from the University library, I had noted three camera brands that seemed to dominate the scene: Nikon, Canon and Pentax. And I sort of felt that if I ever got an SLR for myself it would be from one of these manufacturers.

The Minolta Photographer

But you don’t argue with Santa. The Minolta SRT 100 was a slightly downscaled version of the popular SRT 101, but the difference was almost negligible. The most important feature - actually introduced to the world by the SRT 101 - went into the SRT 100 as well: the meter-coupled aperture pre-adjustment.

It meant this: As you adjusted the aperture on the lens, the finder-image always remained at its brightest.  Turning the aperture ring impacted exposure metering in the usual way, but without changing the actual opening. That happened first as you pressed the shutter button. Granted, aperture blades that snap into place as you press the shutter button had been around already, but that was before the internal metering evolved. The bright viewfinder during the metering and adjusting phase was a major breakthrough and equally important for composing as for accurate focusing (remember: no autofocus yet!).

Of course there is one situation when you need the aperture to close down to the actual value before exposure: To get an idea about the range of sharpness over distance, commonly called “depth of field”.  Depth of field changes with different apertures. To get a visual impression of it, the aperture has to be “stopped down”. Luckily, the depth of field preview button was sturdy and well placed on the Minolta SRTs of this generation. It invited frequent use, something that can't be said about many digital SLRs of the present day.

What bothered me a bit was the absence of a hot shoe for the flash, which meant that the modern flash unit that Santa supplied as a bonus had to be connected by wire. More irritating was the absence of a self-timer. Useful of course for pictures you want to appear in yourself, but in my work in the Learning Resources Lab I had learnt already that a self-timer can be used to delay exposure just a little in order to have a sturdier grip on the camera at the crucial time. I purchased a little external gadget that took care of the problem. With its two signaling arms that were reminiscent of German Railway signals the gadget was a lot more fun than any built-in timer!

This self timer signalled very clearly!

The first extra lens was a used Vivitar 135mm 2.8 tele. A 2X extender I bought along with it. At that time there was nothing like “steady shot” or high ISO functions built into the camera. To hand-hold a camera even with a moderate tele was difficult. Using the 135mm with the extender doubled the focal length to 270 mm and required apertures no larger than 8 for reasonably sharp pictures. That meant tripod in almost all situations.

A 28mm wide-angle lens came next, even this one from Vivitar. It was a new lens this time. With the two extra lenses I was eyeing an extra “body”. A new Minolta model got good reviews and enticed me greatly. It was the XE7, which represented a major paradigm change. The camera was no longer mechanical. It required battery power to function fully. The metal-blade shutter was electronic, but had one single mechanical “emergency” speed - 1/60 sec - that worked even if there was no battery power at all. In hindsight, I must commend Minolta for this type of "plan B" thinking that saved me more than once. In this day and age such a design approach is often sadly lacking... 

Thus outfitted I almost felt like a reasonably well equipped professional. Oddly, some photo job was just around the corner. Without me trying at all.

One day I got a call from a large and well known …Mental Institution! Naturally I was on my guard when they invited me over! Ok, it became clear rather quickly that they were not trying to recruit new patients. They were actually looking for a photographer who was ready, willing and able to take on a special assignment.

I was totally perplexed. I had never gone public, offering services of any kind. How could they know about me and my ambitions in photography? What the Mental Institution had done was simply this: they had contacted my university’s Education Department and asked if they knew an education student who was a good photographer and able to work with slides and slide-shows. They wanted to produce a rather extensive slide-based introductory program, mostly for new staff. An educational touch was to permeate the production, which should give a systematic intro to the institution’s different stations, facilities, programs, therapies and activities.

The Education Department passed this on to their Learning Resources Lab, where the staff knew me as having an ardent interest in slide/sound shows. For my phone number they looked at the sign-out slips for equipment loans. Pretty neat. Can’t think of any other job I came by with less effort.

On the job...

So one day I was on the job and working alongside the person in charge of the project,  making up a general plan. Everything went well and kept me busy for several weeks.
Technically I had to learn a lot, mostly regarding the different and often difficult lighting situations. I used slide film for daylight at various ISO speeds (then called ASA) and film matched for the existing fluorescent lights.

Emotionally the work was demanding, but also rewarding. Since I had a mentally retarded brother myself, I was quite familiar with many aspects of a large institution. I came in contact with very dedicated personnel, but also with the sick, the very sick and even those who weren’t so sick to ought to have been there. There were also people so frightfully disfigured that they were thought of as not being able to live in normal environments, even though there was nothing wrong with them mentally. And time and again I noticed that scary looking faces and bodies became less dramatic within only minutes and eventually almost seemed mainstream. Here are some crops from the many hundred slides taken on the project: