New Joy: Film
Seems strange, doesn’t it? Why on earth is film a new joy? With the support of my wonderful wife, I recently went crazy and bought a Mamiya RZ67 camera:
This is a medium-format camera that shoots 120-size roll film (or 220-size, if one gets a 220 magazine) with a 6×7 frame size (that’s about 6cm x 7cm, technically 56mm x 70mm; for reference, 35mm film frame size is 36mm x 24mm). These negatives are HUGE compared to a 35mm camera. That means a lot of things. In a technical sense, it means shallower depth-of-field, higher resolution, and therefore larger possible enlargements. Medium format film has been used in the commercial photography world for a long, long time. In fact, cameras like my RZ67 here are still in common use, sometimes with film and sometimes with digital backs.
This camera is in no way small. It is not heavy, but it is certainly not small. It probably weighs around the same as my D700 with 24-70mm lens and flash. It isn’t something that you’re going to use to go shooting in stealth-mode, or sneak-up on someone. It has a flip-up waist-level viewfinder. The image is a mirror-image of the scene, so everything moves in unexpected ways when moving the camera. The shutter button is on the bottom. There is no “automatic” on this camera. The lens has a single control for aperture. There is a big, chunky knob on the right side of the camera for setting shutter speed (in whole-stop increments only, from 8 seconds up to 1/400 second). The front of the camera is actually the front edge of a set of bellows–focus is controlled by the two big, chunky knobs on the bottom-front of the camera, which extend or retract the bellows. The viewfinder has a “focus assist” mode–slide a small lever and a center magnifier lens swings up into place for your viewing pleasure.
The camera shoots about 10 frames on a roll of 120 film. Need a vertical-style portrait? Flip a lever and rotate the film back 90 degrees. The viewfinder has a set of mechanical flaps that close-in to indicate the now-vertical orientation of the film. Back to landscape? rotate 90 degrees in the other direction, and the guides automatically retract and new guides deploy for the landscape format preview in the viewfinder.
This isn’t new. There isn’t a thing new about the camera, other than maybe the film I’m putting in it. I bought it used. It was well cared-for, but it isn’t new.
What is new about it is that the use of this camera and shooting in this format is completely new to me. I’ve never done it. I shot my first 6×7 frame on Saturday, June 4, 2011. I then proceeded to shoot more. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. When I got a new DSLR a few years ago, I had to read the manual to learn about some of the more complicated features. But, when I looked through the viewfinder, I understood what I saw. I knew the focal lengths, I knew the depth-of-field, I knew the aspect ratio. I knew that the autofocus would get a decent focus even if I didn’t touch the menus. I knew that the in-camera meter was crazy accurate by itself. I knew that when I took my first frame with it, I could press the “play” button on the back and see what I got. I understood the 35mm camera. I understood shooting digital.
Old Joy: Film
Wait, what? Yeah, it’s an old joy, too. I grew up shooting film. One day, my Dad taught me how to use his old Pentax, and I learned how to shoot in manual. That Pentax didn’t give you a choice–you shot manual or you didn’t shoot. I wanted to shoot, so I learned how to make images. It has a simple needle meter–”+” side was overexposed, “-” side was underexposed. How much? Who knows. I went to high school and shot a lot of film for the yearbook. I was still shooting color. I’d shoot the film and take it to a regular drug store lab for developing and prints. Then my Dad taught me how to develop my own film and make my own prints from black and white film. I remember being a little kid in the darkroom with him. Back then, the darkroom was the one bathroom in our house in Cooperstown, with black plastic in strategic places to keep out any leaking light. I remember those days–my Dad and sometimes my Uncle Andy developing film and making black and white and color prints. I recall being allowed to help roll the drum back and forth on the counter to develop color prints. It was awesome.
Moving on to college, I got access to a better darkroom at the school. I shot a lot of film for the yearbook, and a lot of film for myself. One of the theatre groups found out that I did photos, and they asked me to help take their headshots. If only I knew then just a tiny bit of the stuff that I know now, they would have had some great headshots. I suppose they sufficed, though, because they kept asking me back. And I kept shooting–more practice, more time in the magic darkroom. Most of the yearbook shooters would turn their exposed film back into the yearbook office and be done, but I wanted to see what I got. I wanted to make the prints and be in control of what I gave them–I didn’t want to leave them with a shot that I knew would need some dodge-and-burn, which was impossible to do in their standard print method. I’d go in to (the now-razed) Des Places Hall with a sack full of film and be there from two o’clock in the afternoon until two o’clock in the morning. I’d come home with several new pages of negatives in my binder and a few folders of prints. I’m happy that I kept some of those prints, and I kept all of the negatives that I could.
These are happy memories for me. This is why film is also an old joy for me. It’s a little special when the shutter clicks and you know you just chemically altered some plastic with the same plain old light that you look at every day. Not being able to see what one just captured can be nerve-wracking for someone who has grown up with digital, and the ability to peek at each frame immediately after it is taken. I shot film for years, and I had to learn good technique to do it. If I’m shooting cleanly, then I’m reasonably confident that I have a usable exposure on that film. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I know I got something.
That brings me back to this new camera here. I’ve never shot this format. I’m shooting a film I’ve never shot before (Ilford Delta 3200, which I’m rating at 1600 at the moment). I’ve never shot this camera. When I walk up to someone on the street and ask if I can take their photo, explaining that this is a new camera that I’m trying to learn, I am 100% serious. I have no idea if I’m going to get a usable frame of them. Maybe I’ll find my meter is out of calibration with reality. Or maybe I blew the exposure because I didn’t meter it accurately, or I guessed at a change because I didn’t have time to re-meter the scene before the shot. If I was used to the format and the film, I would know better how to compensate. One thing that shooting and developing one’s own film will do: One will become quickly aware of how to fix exposure problems before they happen, so one doesn’t spend 25 minutes with two rolls of film in a developing tank, agitating for ten seconds every minute, then running through a stop bath for another several minutes, and only then finding out that one’s camera was still set to the shutter speed from the bright-sun sports shoot, and none of the medium-light headshots came out.
I’m so excited to be shooting film again (I pulled-out the trusty N6006 from my days in college shooting yearbook stuff, and have had some Tmax in it for the past few weeks). I’m even more excited to be shooting this new medium format camera. I can’t wait to see what I get. Maybe it’s all junk. Maybe there are a few gems. I don’t know, and I won’t know until I do the work. I’m excited to add some medium format shots to the portrait shoots I do. I’m just excited again, which makes me happy.
Surprises: The Unexpected Portrait
Sometimes, it’s the shot that one doesn’t expect that becomes one’s favorite from a shoot. That’s the deal with the shot at the top of this post. This was from a set of headshots that I was doing for New Kensington / Arnold’s Valley High School drama group this Spring. This girl has beautiful eyes, and they showed up wonderfully in many of the straight-up headshots that I got that day. This was one of those ‘tweener shots. I was asking most of the kids to do a standard smiley pose, and would then ask them to get a serious face, just for some variety. This particular girl would hold her serious face for about 3/10 of a second, and then bust-out in laughter. In one of those in-between moments, this is what I saw: Genuine laughter, and an expression that could have never possibly been posed. This is why I like to shoot portraits. This is a moment that makes me smile every time I see it.
Hopefully, I’ll have some scans from my first RZ67 shots here soon. I’m probably going to need to get a new scanner to scan them, but we’ll see. Until then..
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