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…

And Arlene…

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!