November finds me playing with a pair of vintage Pentax K1000's legendary beasts of burden for photography students for decades. And reflecting on the blatant flimsiness of the Minolta bodies I grew up with.
As a SLR crazed teenager in the pre-ebay, pre-digital 90's I craved and lusted after a Nikon FM in black, such a beast was not to be had for less than $250 (Body) in those days so I had to settle for a Minolta X-370n. What glass was available here in the vast wilderness of the midwest was either out of my pricerange or pure crap. So the supplied 50/1.7 saw a lot of work. I picked up a few misc lenses and got by, drove to Michigan for a battered XG-7. (And killed it a few months later), and kept shooting. Another flea market X-370 found years later lasted me all of a week!
Mom and Grandma buying me the Pentax P30T in about '97 laid the foundation for my second chance at Photography. It survived many years of rough work, cold weather and abuse. Pentax worked a lot of reliability into their most basic of cameras.
