It snowed today, really dry and windy, so I went out with a new camera. Turns out, it's really nice. Mustache kept freezing tho
I got a Minolta XE-7 from my friend the other day and immediately loaded it with a roll of "dubblefilm daily" which is some... entirely unmarked, super grainy, super thin black & white. Not hugely into it.
I wasn't super confident of the meter, because just fooling around it wasn't matching other meters I have. The XE-7 has a stepless shutter when it's in aperture priority, and yknow, you need the meter for that. I figured I'd shoot this roll anyway (cuz I got cold feet and unloaded it, and I didn't wanna use it in anything else) so I scrubbed the controls back n forth to scrape off some oxides and maybe fix it. The meter was trying to overexpose so maybe the resistance was too... high? Who can say. But it came out alright. The film came out of the developer really thin, so I don't think it overexposed anything.
The XE-7 is really a delight to use. It's so easy and so quiet. It's got an electrically-controlled mechanical shutter that just snaps so nicely. The film advance is shorter than most but it's satin smooth. I just wanna fire the shutter all the time. There's gobs of articles around about it, but famously it's a co-design with Leitz, which they built into the R3. Same shutter, same mechanics, but a different mount and meter. Mine's got some pretty pleasant brassing that contrasts nicely with the black paint. It's all I want to shoot right now, even if I don't 100% trust the meter.
