Chicago With The Minolta P’s Panorama
I spend a lot of time in the mid-west of the United States these days and whenever go I like to bring with me a small compact 35mm camera to take pictures with in my free time. Most of the time that camera is my trusty Olympus XA, which is quite possibly the greatest 35mm travel camera ever made thanks to its clamshell design. However, every so often I like to switch things up and on a recent trip I brought along my Minolta P’s.
Also known as the Minolta Riva Panorama or the Freedam Vista, the Minolta P’s is a bit of a dinky little machine. It’s basically a compact 35mm point and shoot camera that has a fixed mask on the 35mm negative turning it into a “panoramic” frame aspect ratio. In other words, it crops the top and bottom of a 35mm negative resulting in a smaller usable negative than what you would typically get on 35mm film.
There really isn’t much to this camera. It has a fixed 24mm f/4.5 lens. No manual control to speak of. The only real choice a photographer can make over the camera is to force the flash off by holding down a button on the top of the camera for several seconds. Everything else including film winding and ISO selection is automatic. However, it shines as a travel camera because it is nicely compact camera that easily fits in the back pocket of my jeans or the breast pocket of a coat.
If you are looking for a great review of the Minolta P’s head over to Analog Cafe, which goes into much more detail than I’m going to write.
There is honestly no real reason why I should love this camera so much, and yet I do. Sometimes as a photograph it is just incredibly refreshing to look at the world with a different aspect ratio in mind, and the Minolta P’s allows a person to do that in a very cheap (I paid about $60 for mine) and compact package. There isn’t a lot of commitment to it, which is exactly what I need sometimes to dust out the cobwebs in my brain. All I have to do is pop in a roll of 35mm film and then enjoy the view. Simple.
The images I’m sharing here on this blog post are from an afternoon walking around downtown Chicago on an oppressively hot and humid day. I exposed about three rolls of film and more than likely shed five pounds of water weight just trekking around on foot for a couple of hours. I think the elongated aspect ratio of the frame works well with the geometric shapes of Chicago’s skyline.
Given the resulting negatives are using about half of what a full 35mm negative would normally use, the scanned images are incredibly grainy. Even with a slower ISO 100 film, golfball sized grain is going to be an inevitable by-product here. I honestly don’t mind. I’ve never been a photographer that runs away from heavy grain. If I was, I certainly wouldn’t use Rodinal as my go to developer.
Camera: Minolta P’s compact 35mm camera.
Film: Fomapan 100 in 35mm. Developed in Rodinal at 1:50, 20C for 7 minutes.
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