Back in 2021, after my father had passed away, I found his old film camera. It was a Minolta X300, exactly the same model that I had bought as my first “serious” camera. Until a few years before he died I had no idea that he had bought the same camera, and I often wondered if it was because I had an X300.
A Well-traveled Minolta
When I returned to our home in Ukraine, the camera came with me. I put it on a shelf alongside my Zenit 11, an exact copy of my very first camera. It served as a reminder of the journey I had made in photography.
In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was in the UK again sorting out the last details of my father’s probate. Getting my wife out of Ukraine became my priority and any thoughts of photography were long gone. The camera remained on that shelf for another two and a half years.
That is, until November 2024, when my wife returned to Odesa to check on our apartment and to bring back some of our more personal possessions. Amongst them was my father’s Minolta X300.
Given that it had made such a journey, I thought it was high time to see if this beautiful piece of 1980s technology still worked.
Being in the UK, film is relatively easy to buy and develop, so I would treat the X300 to a few rolls of black and white film. But first I needed to see if it worked.
Bringing The Minolta Back To Life
My father was a very neat man and kept things clean and tidy, right to the end of his life. This included the Minolta X300. It had been kept in a well-padded camera case and was rarely used.
Nearly three years of dust had built up on it during its lonely existence in Ukraine, but overall, it was in near-mint condition. However, it did not actually work.
The Minolta X300 was, perhaps, one of the last manual cameras. It harked from a simpler time, manual focus, manual film winder, and only the most basic of automatic exposure modes. However, like most cameras of the era, it relied on batteries.
These were LR44, silver oxide batteries, and pretty easy to find. As soon as they arrived I popped them into the X300 and with bated breath thumbed the power switch to on. Nothing happened, but that’s because nothing should happen. The batteries are simply there to power the exposure meter and the electronic shutter.
I pulled the film winder and the shutter cocked. Looking through the viewfinder, I could see that the exposure meter had lit up. Then I pressed the shutter button. It fired, and the Minolta X300 was alive.
A Look Around The Minolta X300
I had always liked the X300. Back in the day I felt it had a modern, minimalist design compared to its contemporaries. Even by the standards of the day, it was a simple camera.
The exposure mode was aperture priority or manual. This was controlled from a dial on the top plate. When the dial read A, you were in AP, if you set that dial to any shutter speed, it became manual exposure.
The top left featured the film rewind handle, below which you set the ISO or ASA as it was more commonly known then. Pulling that handle up, released opened the film back. One thing I did instinctively before opening the back was to turn the rewind handle and check if there was a film still in it. Old habits die hard.
Focussing is entirely manual. My father had a Minolta 35-70mm lens on the camera, a surprisingly fast lens at f/3.5. However, the viewfinder was not particularly bright. The focus aids are matte screen and split image and fairly easy to use. The shutter button has a nice feel. It’s electronic but is soft and tactile in use.
The Minolta X300 is one of those cameras that just feels right ergonomically. It’s quite small for its time, yet even with my big hands and chucky fingers, it felt good.
With the memories of 40 years ago now triggered, it was time to head over to WEX Photographic in Newcastle to get some film.
Shooting With The X300
Returning to a film camera was a slightly surreal experience. At WEX, I bought a couple of rolls of black and white 400 ISO film. I then took the camera and film to my favourite location, Durham.
As soon as I opened the film canister, muscle memory kicked in and I quickly loaded the film. It was a little fiddly but the film loaded correctly.
The dim viewfinder was quite an issue. It was not so much that the image view was dark but the exposure scale was very hard to read in low light. Focusing was actually quite easy, using the split image in the viewfinder. This might be aided by the relatively fast lens, I suspect it might not be quite so easy with a slower lens and less light.
The tactile feel of shooting with a film camera again was a delight. That said, I did keep forgetting to wind on. I checked that the exposure meter was reading correctly by comparing it to my Sony a7RV readings. It was pretty spot on. I shot a series of images including some long exposures, I had bought a proper old school cable release to do this.
The big differences in shooting film are, of course, not being able to review the image on screen and the long wait to get films back. As I shot just before Christmas I had a two week wait to see the end results.
Those results were worth the wait. The Minolta had exposed the film well, a good percentage but not all were sharp but my oh my were they grainy. I had forgotten just how grainy film could be, even at a fairly low 400 ISO. However the fact that a 40 year old camera that probably had not shot a film in 35 years, worked perfectly was a wonderful surprise.
The Other Back Story
There is another story to this camera. One that’s more personal. My father lived all his life in south west London. In the late 80s he was engaged to a woman whose family were from Durham. On trips up, Dad fell in love with the place and they had planned to move there when they married.
Tragically, his fiance died before they could fulfill their dream and my father never returned to Durham.
In a strange twist of fate, having escaped the war in Ukraine, my wife and I now live just fifteen minutes drive from the center of Durham.
It simply felt right that the first images taken on the X300 in several decades should be of this beautiful city that my dad fell in love with.
