Minolta AL-F

Dial your flash's guide number into the lens, anywhere from 32 to 180 in feet, and the Minolta AL-F takes over the arithmetic. Easy Flash couples the aperture to the focusing ring, so as the rangefinder images merge on a subject's face, the lens sets the stop that distance calls for. Behind the glass sits a Seiko leaf shutter that syncs at every speed, 1/500 included. Put the two together on a bright beach, with a friend squinting into the sun and water glaring behind her, and you can light her face without giving up the sea.

Minolta's own history dates the AL-F to July 1967, and it is a narrower camera than the AL whose name it shares. The AL left everything to you and ran down to a full second. In auto, the AL-F hands you a speed dial from 1/30 to 1/500 and keeps the aperture for itself: the CdS eye picks anything from f/2.7 to f/22, and a needle on a scale at the right of the finder shows the stop it chose. Shutter priority doesn't get much plainer. It suits people who think in speeds first, which mostly means people photographing kids and dogs.

The lens is a Rokkor 38mm f/2.7, four elements in three groups, with a 61 degree angle of view that runs a touch wider than a standard normal. Close focus is 0.8 m, near enough for a portrait across a café table. The metering cell lives inside the filter ring at the front of the lens, so anything you screw into the 46mm thread sits in front of the eye as well as the glass. A yellow filter for skies gets read by the meter too, which should roughly account for its factor on its own. A test roll is cheap insurance before you trust that with a deep red. The lens shade threads into the same ring.

Power is the weak spot. The AL-F was built around a 1.35V PX13 or PX625 mercury cell, long since gone from the shelves, and without a cell in it there is no automatic exposure at all. Camera-wiki points to the 1.35V Wein MRB625 as the modern substitute. It is zinc-air, and it begins to fade the moment you peel off its tab, so buy two or three at a time rather than a box. The speed range is the other limit. With 1/30 at the slow end and f/2.7 wide open, a dim kitchen at night means flash or nothing.

Daylight fill is where this body earns its place in a bag. Work out the aperture your guide number and distance give you, take a reading of the background at that stop with Zone Light Meter, then choose whichever speed up to 1/500 holds the sky where you want it. Because the leaf shutter fires the flash at every one of those speeds, the reading goes straight onto the dial.

A 1970 newspaper ad listed the AL-F at $76.50, money aimed at people who wanted to focus and shoot rather than fuss. That is still who it suits: someone after a fixed-lens rangefinder that takes the guesswork out of flash. Look for a clean, unhazed lens and an eye that still swings its needle when you point it at a window. Then open the battery door before anything else. Cells left in for decades can leak, and green crust on the contacts is a bad sign.