6. Working with Lenses

Although it’s sometimes alarming for those of us who have been taking pictures a very long time, the recent tendency for larger companies to absorb smaller vendors has paid some big dividends, most notably in the huge selection of lenses available for the relatively new Sony Alpha DSLR camera line.

In my youth, I managed a camera store for a while, and had access to a broad range of different models, and so used both Konica and Minolta cameras for many years—dating back to the Konica Autoreflex T (the first SLR with autoexposure/through-the-lens metering) and the legendary Minolta SRT-101. Only a few years into the digital SLR era, the two companies joined forces as Konica Minolta, and in turn saw their technology eventually taken over by Sony in 2006. Bye-bye Konica Minolta 7D, hello Sony Alpha models, like the company’s first entry, the Alpha DSLR-A100, each with a legacy of hundreds of lenses from the sorely missed Minolta lineup.