Hey everyone,
So one of my grandfathers passed away earlier on this year. He was super interested in astronomy to the point of building his own observatory from scratch - including telescope - and due to myself investing a lot of time into photography as firstly a hobby before spending some time in a more intense environment as a studio photographer I was given two of his cameras that he kept, both in pretty good condition.
One is a Praktica Super TL with the original leather casing - it has a Meyer-Optik Görlitz Oreston 50mm f/1.8 lens on it and in a separate bag, a Dimension brand 223mm f=2.8 lens.
The other is Minolta X-370 with a gorgeous Tamron 28-200mm f/3.8-5.6 lens popped on and a Vivitar Auto Thyristor 550FD flash tucked in the corner of the camera bag.
There was also a couple rolls of 400 35mm film of which I'm not too sure how old (or new, haha) they all are and neither of them have batteries.
The problem is... whilst I am familiar with basic stuff like "the exposure triangle" and I've handled modern SLR's on a few occasions before, I am a little bit out of the water when it comes to film cameras! I've done a ton of research on batteries and because the Praktica magnesium battery isn't the best to find, I'm debating in between 625A and 357 to tide me over before I drop a chunk of money on the CRIS MR9 adaptor. I live in relatively small town so even if I was to want it re-calibrated for a 1.5 or 1.55v I don't think there's anyone who would be able to do it nearby and I don't know if I feel comfortable doing it myself.
The Minolta was pretty straight forward... everyone who I've read seems to have good experience using the SR44 batteries so that seems to be the way to go.
In terms of film, everyone seems to have their own favourites but with the places I shoot in and the subjects I like, I was thinking about buying a couple of rolls of 200 35mm from Amazon or something but I would love to hear people's opinions about what kinds of film they like, the whole battery situation, or what some favourite subjects to capture with these two are. :)
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the lengthy post :D