Tonya and PQBON's WebLog

Easter in Black and White by SRT-101

On Easter I picked up a third hand Minolta SRT-101. My mother gave the camera to my father for their engagement. My father then gave it to my sister since she too is into photography. She neglected it after she graduated highschool. It sat on her floor unused and unloved. I asked if I could have it since I was thinking of buying a fully manual SLR or rangefinder 35mm camera. Why buy one when you can acquire one through other means. The SRT-101 also has some cachet being older then I am. However, I would bet it has had less then 100 rolls of film run through it.

OK, now that we are all caught up... The day before easter Tonya and I had a bunch of errands to run so I picked up some B&W Kodak 125PX and Illford HP5Plus. The one thing I didn't get was a battery for the TTL light meter built in to the camera. Since I don't have a stand alone light meter I guessed at all the exposer settings for every shot. This was interesting on a film camera where I couldn't check each shot so I had no feedback. I shot the Illford 400 in Folsom at my parents and at a park in the morning and evening with the indirect sunlight. I shot the Kodak 125PX at Tonya's mother's house in the bright sunlight. After 3 rolls of film I managed to only seriously overexpose 1 shot, seen down below. Most shots were a few stops off either way but they were easily fixable. I was able to sort of fix the one seriously overexposed shot in Lightroom and Photoshop. The image has some definite issues but given that the initial frame was over exposed and invisible when the negative was held up to the light. Weather it was luck or intuition I managed to not dramatically underexpose any frames.