A while back I decided to buy a film camera again. Not for doing any paid work – just for fun. I knew exactly what I wanted (I still want it), but then this baby showed up on ebay. Its a Mamiya 645 medium format camera from around about 1980.
Sometimes I feel a little more like a computer technician than a photographer with todays cameras. They do a lot of the work for you. Thats not a complaint – because today’s style of photography demands the ability to take lots of photographs pretty quickly.
Having this camera will hopefully teach me to slow down a bit. It’s totally manual, so the resulting photograph is completely my work. Thats quite rewarding actually. So before doing anything interesting with it, I just stuck a film in it and shot a roll of family. The battery died half way through which ruined a few of my shots – but I thought you might like to see them!
First, here’s the camera.
I quite like the look of some Ilford presets I have for digital, so I thought I’d see how close the film is to the digital presets..
So here’s the first pic of my daughter drawing…
The manual focus is slow and takes a lot of getting used to. Strangely, even though this next ones a little soft it doesnt really matter…
It’s not great for kids – not being able to shoot off three or four shots quickly when they smile is a definite drawback!
But like the next two! (Ben’s photo was taken in Portstewart on a day out). I love the graininess of this particular film.
And this is my brother who was cutting the grass during the experiment!
Loving the new hair style Arlene. Can’t remember what it was like before!