Thursday, July 27, 2023

NEX-3 and the Voigtlander Color Skopar 35 F2.5



I am still not over the fact that this beloved setup of mine is gone forever.

The Sony NEX-3 came out more than a decade (13 years!) ago. I was already a Sony digital user with Sony's first A100 DSLR from 2006. But the mirrorless usecase (and hence the future) was obvious to me so I sold my DSLR and got the Nex-3 with it's 18-55 kit lens.

The reason I came to Sony was that my friend Himanshu had a couple of Minolta lenses. So when I earned my first money and ran straight to the JJ Mehta camera shop we naturally gravitated towards the Minolta cameras. I got the Minolta Dynax 5. After a while Minolta got taken over by Konica and they rebranded as Konica-Minolta. After a while apparently Konica sold the camera division to Sony and Sony continued with the same Minolta A mount. Hence the Sony A100 with the A mount.

Coming back to this setup: the NEX-3 was a fantastic camera. Super light weight and compact - hardly larger than a serious point & shoot. But the lens was long and of average quality. So I went in search of used rangefinder lenses on the forums as the new E mount was adaptable to other mounts. I purchased this Voigtlander Color Skopar 35/2.5 lens from a stree photographer in New York city. This lens, even with the adapter, made the overall package exceptionally compact. People did not believe that it was an APS-C setup. The rendering of the lens was endearing and many of my best photos are clicked with it. I miss it.




No comments: