Bill Smith's Photography

  I haven't shot with one of my Minolta XD-11's in ages. It's a platform some shooters looking for a feature rich manual focus camera that's intuitive to use. In the late 1970s the Canon A1 was the all singing all dancing manual focus camera for those who weren't interested in getting an F-1. Sadly the A-1 had ergonomics that were, really Canon. The Nikon FE, Pentax K2 and Olympus OM-2n were only apterture priority. Minolta had the great leap forward with the XD-11 which had both aperture and shutter priority with the MD Rokkor lens range in a package that was intuitive to use. Leica used the XD platform for their post Leicaflex R series of cameras. Sadly you can't mount MD Rokkor lenses on the R4,5,6 and 7 models.  If there's one camera system I would recommend if you are on a bit of a bit of a budget is the Minolta XD-7/11, granted the electronics could get flaky but we're talking cameras 40 years and older. That said if you find an fully operational c...

Didn't think I was going to buy into the Nikon rangefinder system this  year, first it was an S2, later on while picking slide film I was having processed at Downtown Camera I made my way to the used section with the naive thought I was going to look for some used Voightlander and Zeiss glass for my Leica M kit. Oh, I was so wrong, There it was in the display case with the Nikkor S 50 f1.4 lens, the Nikon SP rangefinder, always wanted one, didn't think I was going to buy this year. Jo-Anne stepped in for my brother Alex who is my usual enabler in these sorts of things was away(he was on vacation in Berlin with my sister in law).  I finally got a chance to shoot with it in the Beaches and the SP is one sweet rig. Is it better than the Leica M2 and M3? No, but it's light years better than the Zeiss Ikon Contax IIa it was based on with a titanium shutter in my camera, a film advance lever, the same one you see on the Nikon F, the camera that demolished the German camera indust...