I told myself that I deserved it, that I’d been working hard and not indulging my other, travel, passion half as much as I did last year. I told myself that it was time to start exploring the world of film again in a more serious capacity. I told myself that it would help me with my forays into documentary photography.
And that was how I ended up buying a medium format film camera on eBay. It had to be film: partly because I prefer the effect of film for this type of work, and partly because digital medium format cameras are so expensive it’s literally eye-watering.
I started my research on eBay as usual, and bookmarked a number of cameras that looked good and in my price range. I then started to do some basic research on which ones had the best reviews. I try not to get too invested in this stage, as there’s so much personal opinion around - and by the time a camera is second or third-hand its journey could be very different to another. I eventually bid on a Mamiya 645 with an as-fast-as-I-could-find f/1.9 lens. One of the bad things about moving to the Fuji X system is a lack of full-frame bokeh beauty, compared to the Canon I was using before.
First Impressions
For a “compact’ medium format camera, this thing is a beast. It is literally built like a brick. This is really not a street photography camera, and nor would you want it to be from an economic point of view. With 12-16 shots per roll of film, you would be spending more money than on bricks and also spending more time changing the roll than actually taking pictures
The shutter is a serious action on this camera. It’s pretty satisfying, hearing it go, and it starts to give context to why this model is actually so heavy. Anything lighter and it would be camera shake a-go-go
The set-up is a whole new world for the digital photographer. I downloaded a manual from the very useful Butkus camera manual website, and immediately asked my husband to read it and work out how to load the top viewer and film :)
The viewfinder is a very different “kettle of fish” to a digital camera’s set-up, with a large part of the viewfinder frosted with a circle of ‘clarity’ in the centre. This seems quite dirty on the unit I have acquired, and I’m not convinced that the mirror plate is as clean as it could be. So I have resolved to rattle off a few rolls of film and get an understanding of the general state of affairs before doing more research to find a camera service shop in central London.
I actually love the relatively low number of shots to a film. You can easily bosh off a roll in a weekend or couple of hours, giving you a mini-project right there and then. With 24 or 36 exposures on a 35mm film, sometimes the roll is there for weeks while you find the opportunity to finish it off with something worthwhile.
There are so many creative options for 120 film. I have indulged and ordered various types at Analogue Wonderland - and can’t wait to compare and contrast the results.
It’s difficult to tell right now whether issues I’m seeing are my fault or the camera’s. When loading a new film you have to take the film insert right out of the camera back, and this action resets the film counter to 0. On loading a lomo film earlier today, something didn’t happen quite right and the film advanced only 5 or 6 frames before the shutter decided not to fire. I think this was because the counter had not reset to 0. But whether this was a defect of the camera (I’d definitely removed the film insert) or time-honoured user error, at this stage I can’t say. Equally the first film I unloaded didn’t seem to be fully advanced around the spool; I think I followed the instructions but maybe the film caught slightly due to being extremely expired old film from eBay. As a scientific experiment this one definitely has a few too many variables to consider.
Overall though I am loving the new toy. It has so many possibilities, including the ability to multiexpose a frame, and I really cannot wait to see the results of the photographic experiments. I’ll post them here as I get them.
