5 frames in Switzerland with a MINOX 35 GT and Silbersalz 35 500T

I am a French electronics engineer, having spent most of my career in information systems. Now retired, I have more time to devote to photographic hobbies. I started photography at the age of 10, having received an instamatic Kodak for my birthday, then switched to a Canon AE1 (which I still own and which still works perfectly) in 1979. I now have some other cameras.

I have never succumbed to the charms of digital photography and have always remained faithful to film. I mainly practice landscape photography, especially during my vacation stays.

I do not want this article to be a review of the Minox 35GT. There are already some on the web and on 35mmc, and I am not an expert in cameras, although I am interested in them a lot. I do not want either to make a review of the Silbersalz 35 (Kodak Vision 3) 500T film stock. There are also some on the web, and I don’t use enough different films stocks to be able to make relevant comparisons. This article is only intended to share my experience, as amateur photographer, on the use of this camera with this film, illustrating it with shots of places I love.

Having shot mainly colour slide film (Fuji Provia 100F) during the past few years, I decided some time ago to go back to colour negative film. The main reason was that colour slide films were becoming scarce and expensive, and the second reason was that I had been sometimes disappointed by the results in high contrast situations, where the shadows were very often too dark, or the bright areas overexposed.

So, I began to search on the web for colour negative films with good exposure latitude and found good opinions about the Silbersalz 35 branded Kodak Vision 3 cinefilm. I decided to have a try with their film & service bundle, which was financially attractive, and chose the mixed one (050D, 250D, 200T and 500T).

As I shoot mainly landscapes, the question was: What will I do with the 500T, as landscape photography is not what this film is primarily aimed at. As I had some vacation in Switzerland in the winter of 2024, I planned to visit the Pierre Gianadda foundation, in Martigny. So, I put the roll of 500T in my Minox 35 GT, the idea being to use it indoors.

The Pierre Gianadda foundation proposes exhibitions of paintings, photos, sculptures, a Gallo-Roman museum, an automobile museum, concerts. It was founded by Leonard Gianadda, an Engineer who has professionally succeeded in the construction of buildings and works, and who was also a photo journalist in his young days. He created the foundation as an hommage to his brother Pierre, who died in an aircraft crash, trying to help other passengers. If interested, you can find everything about the foundation here

The automobile museum presents fifty old vehicles (from 1897 to 1939), most of them rare, and seemed the perfect place to use this kind of film, as it is located in a basement with only artificial lighting. I set the film sensitivity at 250 ISO on the camera, as advised by Silbersalz.

The Minox 35GT is an automatic camera with aperture priority. You select an aperture on the lens and the integrated light meter automatically determines the shutter speed, depending on the available light and the film sensitivity. A needle in the viewfinder indicates the speed selected. For all the shots inside the museum, I adjusted the aperture to have a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second. This gave an aperture between f2.8 and f4 depending on the shot.

Regarding the focus adjustment, the Minox has no rangefinder, so it is necessary to rely on zone focusing, which is not so difficult, the 35mm lens having a good depth of field even at f2.8. For example, at f2.8, focusing at 5 meters gives everything in focus between roughly 4 meters and 8 meters, perfectly adequate for photographing a car.

Here is one of the shots I made inside the museum, a Bugatti type 40 from 1928:

I find that the shot captures very well the atmosphere of the museum, characterized by moderate lighting, with details coming out very well and nice colours. I will come back at the end of this article on the editing done on each of the frames.

A permanent exhibition of around fifty modern sculptures also takes place in the park of the foundation, which was the opportunity to test the film also in daylight. According to Silbersalz, it is not necessary to use any filter, as their scanning process takes care of the potentially necessary colour corrections. This is good because the Minox 35GT does not allow for a filter to be fitted. The weather on this day was average, overcast, no blue sky but rather bright light. The photo below shows the lake of the foundation park, with, in the background, the Sheeps and Lambs sculpture by François-Xavier Lalanne:

Another shot of this same sculpture, taken closer:

I am not a compulsive photographer. Thirty six frames are a lot for me, and the roll was far from being entirely exposed at the end of the day. I had therefore to find other occasions to use the Minox during this vacation.

One of these occasions was when visiting the basilica of Valère, in Sion. Sion is the capital of the canton of Valais and is dominated by two hills. The basilica of Valère is located on one of these two hills, the second hill being occupied by the castle of Tourbillon.

The basilica of Valère has the oldest playable organ in the world, built around 1435. The beginning of the construction of the basilica itself dates back to the middle of the 12th century. If interested, you can find more information about the basilica of Valère here.

And here is a photo taken inside the basilica, in low natural light, which is very often the case in churches:

But the roll was far from being finished after this visit…

Since it was winter, in Switzerland, it was impossible not to consider some ski descents. And since the Minox is perfectly adequate to fit in the pocket of a ski jacket, why not try some images of snowy mountains?

So I took the Minox for a day of skiing in the resort of Saas Fee. Saas Fee is a charming village located in the upper Valais, at an altitude of 1800 m. It is in the german speaking part of the Valais, in the east of the canton. No cars in the village guarantees quietness and a ski area between 1800 and 3500 m guarantees snow, summer skiing being even possible on the Feegletscher. If interested, you will find all the necessary information here. It is a wonderful destination, both in winter and summer.

Although I find that the automatic exposure of the Minox gives good results in most situations, I was not confident with a snowy landscape and sunny weather. So, I also took a light meter in my pocket. The main drawback of the Minox 35 GT for me is the absence of a manual mode, meaning that it is necessary to change the ISO setting to obtain the desired combination of aperture and speed. The ISO setting is not very easy to change (especially with ski gloves), but this can be done (with the ski gloves removed!), and here is the result:

This is a photo of the Mischabel massif, with the Alphubel, the Täschhorn, the Dom and the Lenzspitze. The Dom is the highest mountain (4545 meters) located entirely in Switzerland (The Dufour peak, which is higher at 4634 meters, is on the Italian border in the Monte Rosa massif).

And this was the fifth (and last) frame for this article.

As a conclusion, the Minox 35GT is a wonderful small camera, very pleasant in hand, well designed with its retractable lens, very simple to use. The 35mm lens provides a huge depth of field (at f8, the hyperfocal distance is roughly 5 meters, which means that if you set the distance on the lens to 5 meters, everything between 2.5 meters and the infinite will be sharp), so that the absence of a rangefinder impacts only close distance shots. The shutter release button is very soft, meaning that you can use slow speeds without fear of camera shake.

The only drawbacks I see are:

• No manual mode: you may have to change the ISO setting to achieve your choice of exposure and speed combination when the internal light meter finds its limits. There is a backlight switch which doubles the exposure time, but I prefer measuring the light with a meter and chosing the aperture and speed combination.
• Electronics dependant: no battery, no shoot, and if the electronics break down, you will never take photos with this camera again.

I bought this camera new in the mid eighties and, although I never used it intensively and although I am very careful with my equipment, I had to have it repaired one time, because it no longer fired. Fortunately, it was still possible to repair it at that time. I am pretty sure it would no longer be possible now. It was at the same time « adapted » to take 4 button batteries instead of the 5.6 V mercuric oxyde battery, but I do not know exactly what was done. I use it with 4 SR 44 silver oxyde batteries and it works …

Regarding the Silbersalz 35 500T cinefilm, it has proved quite versatile both indoors and outdoors, in artificial or natural light, in all situations encountered.
The processing by Silbersalz proved very reliable. You can chose between standard resolution jpeg files (4000×2500 pixels) and, optionally (total 10 euros for 1 to 4 rolls), high resolution lossless jpeg2000 files (14000×9000 pixels) with 16 bits/channel colour resolution, which I prefer.

The scans are rather low contrast and low colour saturation, as most of the reviews which can be found on the web do mention, which leaves room for adjustments during editing. They include the border.

I did very little editing on the photos presented here. All photos have been reframed to eliminate the borders. On photos 1 and 4, I finely adjusted the horizontality. On photos 2 and 3, I increased the saturation of the colours slightly. On photos 2 and 5, I stretched the histogram to enhance the contrast. I cropped photo 5 a little to eliminate cables that appeared at the bottom right of the shot and that I hadn’t noticed while taking the photo (I don’t like to see parasitic elements in my landscape photos). All this editing process was made with Gimp on a Macbook Air M1.

If you are after a camera to be taken anywhere at any time and able to deal with most situations, the Minox 35GT loaded with Silbersalz 35 500T is certainly a good candidate.

I hope these few images gave you the desire to discover this region of Switzerland, which provides cultural activities, a rich historical heritage and a magnificent natural environment for hiking, biking, skiing and … taking photos, both in winter and summer.

Thank you for reading.

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