He took it with the Minolta, but you can see the camera case around my neck. The first of the old photos below, taken by my dad, is from around that time. Still, he taught me how to focus, and later, the basics of aperture and shutter speed. He got it for his own use when I was barely old enough to operate a camera. My dad bought the Minolta X-370s in the mid-nineties in Kolkata, the city where I grew up. It’s also the camera which got me into photography in the first place. It’s the camera which brought me back to film photography.
Nevertheless, the Minolta X-370s has a special place in my heart. It was Minolta’s low-end SLR, manufactured with liberal use of plastic parts, and not in Japan but – gasp! – in China. On the contrary – and notwithstanding my ‘glamour photo’ attempts above – the X-370s is a thoroughly un-glamorous, fully-electronic camera. You won’t catch reviewers describing the X-370s as exuding “class and sophistication” (as did Jeb in his review of the Minolta XD) or as a “technological marvel of its day” ( James on the X-700). However, even a die-hard Minolta fan is unlikely to get excited about the humble X-370s. Minolta never had quite the same cachet as Canon or Nikon, but they do have a cult following, and of course they get plenty of love here on Casual Photophile. The camera I used to take these photographs was a Minolta X-370s – a manual-focus SLR from the early nineties. 37 color prints with gorgeous saturation and a three-dimensional look which far exceeded the capabilities of the digital bridge camera I was using at the time. Is this what I was missing? It was summer 2011, and at a small photo-lab in downtown Tokyo I was holding 6×4″ colour prints from the first roll of film I’d shot in over six years.
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