Swan Lake

I haven't been shooting much 35mm film on my SLR.

If I do shoot film I tend to shoot on a rangefinder but when I switched from Canon to Sony I bought a used Minolta film camera for my Sony lenses. It's been almost a year and I put my first roll of film in the camera today. It took about 20 minutes to figure out how to change the ISO.

I was a little disappointed on how it handled. New digital cameras have menu's that have been refined and make sense, while this menu leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, my film camera has a menu, it was one of the last models before Minolta tried digital so has many of the digital features. I'll have to shoot with it some more but it felt a little flimsy to me... not the beast I'm used to.

I headed down to the lake for some sailboats stacked against the wall shots, but didn't see any. I did see a huge flock of white swans and tried my luck there. Not sure I made much of a photo.

After processing the film I learned a great lesson, check used cameras as soon as you buy them. The shutter seems to be gone on this camera. Half the frame was way darker than the other half. Every frame. I tried to save it by burning in the print but it's not much of a shot anyway.

Rob Skeoch
www.thepicturedesk.ca