Dad Cam
Why I bought the worst camera in the world
This is the Minolta Maxxum 5000. It’s a very 80s camera. It’s sleek in its all-black body. At the time it was released (1986) it had the top notch auto focus and automatic settings technology. It was simultaneously the coolest and worst camera in the world and last year I bought one. Why?
For the very simple answer, we have to travel back to my sophomore year of high school and I took level one photography. Manual cameras were preferred, but I didn’t have that option. My dad had the Maxxum 5000. It was fully automatic, so it was good at fast (and oftentimes blurry) photos, and because it was made out of plastic, it was light as fuck, but really that’s it. However, I learned how to take pictures on this camera, which is why it holds such a big place in my heart.
When I started that class, my dad gifted me the camera, or so I thought. I used the hell out of it, even when I didn’t have access to a darkroom to process and develop my own film and prints. This camera is a big reason why it was so hard to move to digital. My relationship with my dad, which was already tenuous at best, slowly deteriorated and he asked for the camera back, so I returned this trusty beast.
A couple years ago, I got back into film photography (most of the journey is on this Substack) and the old Maxxum 5000 came back into my brain. I found a copy on eBay for $30 with a lens that was in pretty decent shape for a 40 year old camera. I finally had one back in my dumb Brown paws.
In the time since I got back into film photography, I’ve had to relearn a lot of the basics that I either forgot or didn’t pay attention to because I had an advanced camera that did all the work for me. I’m now used to shooting manual, which this camera is fucking awful at. I have managed to get some pretty kick ass images out of it.
The magic of the camera isn’t the same. It’s a concept that lives well in my memory, but it serves absolutely no practical use any longer. The sting of my dad taking the camera back doesn’t even hurt the way it used to. There’s definitely a big part of me who bought this with the thought of “Yo, I got my own.” As it turns out, that level of pettiness doesn’t sustain me like it used to. So this camera is going back out into the ether. Maybe to some young buck who could use an easy film camera that has the auto focus power of a machine that is 40 years old. But alas, we’ve come to the end of our journey. Godspeed.