Minolta 35 Model II

Loading a Barnack Leica means pulling the baseplate and feeding the cassette up into the body without seeing where the leader goes. On the Minolta 35 Model II you swing the back open on its hinge, drop the cassette in, and watch the leader bite on the take-up spool. Chiyoda Kogaku had been building Minolta 35s since May 1947, and by February 1953, when Minolta's own history dates the Model II, the company knew which Leica habits were worth copying. The 39mm Leica thread mount stayed, so the 45mm f/2.8 Super Rokkor it shipped with screws off and any other screw-mount lens you own goes on in its place.

The finder is the bigger change. A Barnack Leica gives you one window to focus and a second one to frame, and your eye hops between them. Here the rangefinder and viewfinder share a single window, so you bring the patch together and compose without moving your head. It has a self-timer too, which the Barnack Leicas of 1953 did not. After a roll or two the Leica routine starts to feel like extra steps.

Speeds are split across two dials on a cloth focal-plane shutter. The slow dial runs from a full second to 1/8, while the fast dial covers 1/25 to 1/500, plus T and B. Reaching for the wrong dial is the beginner mistake, and you stop making it after a few days. There is a two-pin Leica-type sync terminal, and the manual specifies flash bulbs made for focal-plane shutters. Nothing in it mentions electronic flash, so treat a modern speedlight as untested; the manual only covers FP bulbs.

People get caught out by the frame size. A Model II negative is nominally 24x34mm, a couple of millimeters shorter than the standard 24x36 frame, and that shows up in scanner masks and contact sheets. Full 24x36 came only with the Model IIB in May 1958, the update that also brought lever wind. If your negatives need to match the rest of your bag, the IIB is the one to buy. If you want the 1953 body, compose a little loose and live with the narrower frame.

Its weak point is age, and the damage sits in the curtains. Cloth that has been running across the gate for seventy years goes stiff and develops pinholes, and sometimes it pulls away from its rollers altogether. Mike Eckman's loaner turned up with its curtains detached from their spools. Assume any Model II you find needs an overhaul from a technician who knows screw-mount focal-plane shutters. Before you trust it with film, take the lens off, open the back, hold the body up to a bright window with the shutter closed, and look for light coming through the cloth.

You won't find a meter of any kind on it. That rarely bothers the people who buy one: screw-mount shooters who already meter by hand, and collectors of Japanese Leica-thread bodies who want something besides the Canons. Next to the Barnack Leicas it was built to compete with, it is the easier camera to load and focus. A spot or average reading from the Zone Light Meter app stands in for the meter Minolta never fitted. Once you have the number, check which of the two dials it lives on before you wind on.