It’s been a stressful couple of weeks. I’ve moved into a new apartment, bought a new Cal-King-sized bed. I’m anticipating further expenses down the road with the whole getting married thing, as wonderful as that is.

But the good news is that I think I’ve finally pinned down a film camera kit I’ll be sticking with for a while. No more swapping, trading and buying for a while. I’m just waiting on a new Domke bag, and the elusive Olympus 35sp (which is to be my dedicated B&W shooter) to come back from repairs.

Last week was my 29th birthday, possibly the first of many 29th birthdays I shall have. I dragged my fiance to the Chino Planes of Fame air museum with my Autocord and 35RC in tow. Enjoy.

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Automazing

I think I’ve finally found a camera I feel a genuine kinship with, a real connection. Dare I call it love? Well, I wouldn’t go that far with inanimate objects. But the Minolta Autocord is becoming one of my favorite cameras. It beats down the Yashica-Mat 124g in terms of build and image quality hands down in my opinion. And looking at the images I’m getting from it I can’t say I miss the Hasselblad.

To test out this little beauty (this is the RG version 2 from 1962 by the way), I went to the Muckenthaler Motor Car Festival in Fullerton, CA. Taking photos of cars is kind of cliché in my opinion, I see a lot of Lomo squares of classic cars on flickr all the time. But cars are pretty and they stay still and they’re colorful, so they’re the perfect thing to test out a new camera with.

I brought a roll of Plus-X (a film I keep coming back to), Tri-X 320 (which I regrettably overexposed a stop), and the new Kodak Ektar 100. The retina looks more like a slide film than a color negative… and it produces reds that really do a number on my eyes as you’ll see in the pics below.

I’ve included the squares I liked, and a few cropped images - I felt some of them benefited from a crop into a rectangular format.

Up next - the Planes of Fame in Chino then followed by the new Star Trek for birthday fun!

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