To you, who happened upon thisThings
Putting the Minolta X-300 from my moving boxes back to work
While sorting through boxes before a move, I found an old film camera in a leather case. The case still carried the words 三星 MINOLTA. My mother, I am told, bought it to capture my childhood, and the photographs it took back then are still in our albums.
Samsung and Minolta seemed an unlikely pair. As it turns out, it was a camera Samsung brought out with Minolta in the 1980s, the camera fathers carried in those days. Minolta made the X-700 for serious photographers, and the X-300 was its pared-down sibling, built so that anyone could shoot with ease.
I had never used a film camera. Not knowing whether it worked, I pressed every button and turned the film advance lever. Only after a few YouTube videos did I learn that it takes LR44 batteries, and once I had picked some up at Daiso and put them in, the power came on. The lever had refused to turn further because the shutter was already cocked. When I pressed the shutter release, a click rang out. So this is what a film camera sounds like, I thought.
Apart from some mold inside the lens, the outside was spotless, thanks, it seems, to all those years safe in its leather case. When I looked for somewhere to have it repaired, I read that the X-300 had been the everyman's camera of its day and could be fixed almost anywhere. Still, I wanted it in well-known hands, and of the few places that kept coming up, I chose Segae Camera Repair Center. There was no particular reason. It was simply the one whose story I liked best among the blog posts I read. A single review, a single introduction, can decide where someone's steps lead. It reminded me why telling people about your work matters so much to anyone who makes things.
Sewoon Square is about a block's walk from Euljiro 4-ga Station on Line 2. It is split into two buildings, one for jewelry and one called the Techno building. I assumed the two were connected and walked into the jewelry side, and only after opening the map app again did I realize the Techno building stood on its own, just past it.
When I finally found my way into the Techno building, its first floor felt like a place where time moves a little slower. It was my first visit, yet nothing felt strange, probably because it resembled the Yongsan electronics market I had once wandered through.
Small camera shops stood shoulder to shoulder along the corridor. Segisa Camera and Jeil Camera Repair were names I had seen again and again in search results while looking for a repair shop. Seeing shops I had only known as words appear before me with real signs was oddly heartening. Segae Camera Repair Center was further down that corridor.
The owner, busy at the workbench, took the camera before I had said more than a few words, as if nothing more needed explaining. Dials turned, the lever wound, each button pressed in turn, all without a moment's hesitation. How many cameras like this one must have crossed that workbench? The camera was not in bad shape, I was told, and a lens cleaning with a few new parts should do, for about 70,000 won and a week or so. I filled out the claim slip, asked them to take good care of it, and left.
A week later a text said the repair was done. I cleared my afternoon and headed back to Sewoon Square, stopping at a photo shop on the way for a roll of Kodak Gold 200. The only way to know whether the camera had truly come back was to shoot with it.
The owner walked me through everything that had been fixed. Since I had never loaded film, I asked whether they might load it for me, and the answer was a happy yes, with a few tricks of the trade besides. I quickly took out my phone and filmed it. I still watch that video whenever I load a roll. Someday I suppose I will load film as casually as they did. With a quick lesson in the controls as well, I could start shooting right there.
That day I walked out of Sewoon Square, past Cheonggyecheon and Gyeongbokgung to City Hall, and filled most of the roll, saving the last few frames for Mong. The next day I left it with Gorae Sajingwan to be developed. I was on edge the whole time in front of the scanner, and only when a sharp frame of Mong appeared could I finally breathe. The camera still remembered light.
When I first found it, not knowing whether it even worked, I had given it only a passing look. Home again, knowing it could take in light once more, I finally noticed every corner of it. All this time a single UV filter had guarded the lens in place of a cap, and perhaps that was why the filter was covered in scratches. If this camera was to come with me every time I went out, I wanted to give it a cap of its own. Luckily a lens cap bearing the Minolta logo was still to be had, and I ordered one straight away.
To protect the lens for years to come, I replaced the filter as well, with a B+W clear filter. Secondhand lenses are easy enough to find, but none of them could stand in for the lens that has held my childhood.
The rust on the strap lugs had seeped into the old strap. As it happened, I had spare Peak Design anchors from my Sony camera, so I put them on the X-300 too. Now a single strap can move between the two cameras.
I fitted the new filter, capped the lens and hung the strap. Once I had gently lifted the dust from every crevice with a cotton swab, it looked far too neat for a camera born in the 1980s.
Holding a film camera for the first time, I met, one by one, things I had never felt with a digital camera. The small effort of winding the lever before the next frame, the click of the shutter falling, the finitude of thirty-six exposures to a roll. Above all, each frame on film is a mark left where that day's light touched it. It cannot be erased and taken again, so every frame is the only one of its kind.
Once this camera held a child standing in front of the lens. Now it holds what I see from behind it.