Originally Published in The Minox Memo
Series 2, Volume 1, Number 2. Spring 2002

CONFESSIONS OF A MINOX SHOOTER

Ernest Murphy
Honolulu, Hawaii USA

(Editor's Note: Ernest Murphy uses a variety of Minox cameras, including the 35mmm models. He will be contributing an occasional discussion of what they can do and why he likes them. This is his first.)

My own very amateur photography has, in the last couple of years, moved toward smaller and easier-to-carry equipment, taking advantage of old and new technologies with the aim of maintaining high image quality.

I now combine Minox 35mm and submini cameras and one of the smallest consumer-grade digital cameras for everything I photograph. All my equipment can go anywhere I go, compactly and easily.

I've started using a Canon S100 digital Elph (Ixus in some countries) and have begun selling off my 35mm film gear. I'm keeping my Minox 35GL, B and C, because I enjoy using Minoxes so much and they meet my portability and image-quality requirements. I believe recent advances in film quality make subminiature Minoxes more useful for general photography than they ever have been. Let me explain ...
The digital Elph is, in format if not in physical size, a subminiature camera, with the same wide-open depthof- focus advantages the submini Minoxes have. Its zoom-lens focal length is in the 5-to-10mm range, roughly equivalent to a 35-to-70mm lens on a 35mmformat film camera. (The subminiature Minoxes have 15mm lenses.) The high cost of producing larger photo "chips" -- the digital camera's equivalent of film – is why
many consumer digital cameras are de facto subminis.
I began using subminiature Minoxes several years ago because of the advent of Minocolor Pro 100 film, actually Fuji Reala 100 packaged and sold by Minox. This product makes it possible for me to obtain very highquality, fine-grain color pictures from a submini Minox using commercially sold and processed film.

Many people enjoy slitting, loading and developing Kodak Tech Pan and its ultra-fine-grain, high-resolution cousins. Many others do not. With Minocolor Pro 100, we can obtain much better images than were previously possible from Minox submini cameras using commercially sold and processed film of equivalent film speed.

I love my Minox 35GL as a street shooter because its toy-like, plasticky looks make it utterly unthreatening to people I point it at. As an optical machine for making high-quality images, it's as good as my Leicas and Nikons. It is, of course, more portable although less flexible. Some Minox 35 models are more reliable than others. A Web search on the words Minox 35 will tell you which ones. A Minox 35 is, for my kind of shooting, my "large-format" camera because 35mm film quality has made such tremendous advances in the last decade or so. The Minox 35s, of course, can take advantage of the
huge range of excellent films available for 35mm cameras.

This combination of cameras gives me almost everything I need for the way I shoot. It lacks telephoto capability, something I've never used much anyway. I still sorely miss the ultra-wide-angle lenses I used with my Nikons and Leicas. I can still do excellent close-ups of reasonably-lit flowers, but not the true-macro rain-forest and jungle shoots I used to do with 10 to 30 pounds of bulky equipment.

But I'm a middle-aged guy now, and I do much less jungle-trekking than when I was younger. Now my entire photographic equipage, including a Minox tripod, weighs at most 2.5 pounds (1.2 kilos), usually less because I seldom carry all four cameras and the Minox tripod. I won't sell my heavy Gitzo tripod, though. Nothing beats the crazy looks I get when I set up that monster and mount on it a camera the size of a chocolate bar.

I hope to see Minox create a digital camera the size and shape of Minox subminiatures. The necessary electronic technology is not yet physically small enough, and neither are existing digital data-storage media. But electronics components continue to get smaller and more powerful, so I'm optimistic. As for tiny, highresolution optics, well, Minox wrote the book on those.