I love the photographs I can get with my Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, but the camera isn’t exactly portable. There’s something special about medium format film, and I’ve wanted to be able to get that quality without lugging around a suitcase. Before Memorial Day, I shopped around and purchases a used Mamiya C330 Professional.
It’s a twin lens reflect camera, so it is taking me some time to adjust. With the twin lens, you compose with the upper lens while the camera uses the lower lens to capture the exposure. That creates a problem with composition, where the resulting photograph is framed slightly differently from what I see through the waist-level finder. Also, when focusing close, the camera extends its bellows, which requires an adjustment to the settings to ensure enough light is reaching the film.
With practice, I’m sure I can overcome these quirks. When I picked up the negatives from the lab, I was surprised about how accurate the exposures were. I had, for the most part, guessed the exposure settings using the “Sunny 16” rule.
The camera taxes a 6cm x 6cm square format image, a little smaller than the 6cm x 7cm provided by the RZ67, but it comes in a package that is much more convenient. I had considered getting a Mamiya 7 II for a portable camera capable of 6×7 negatives, but I liked the idea of the twin lens reflex more than the idea of a rangefinder.
As I tend to do, I took the camera to Princeton to get a feel for its capabilities. I chose the black and white Ilford HP5 Plus for the first roll. The second roll was used mostly for Memorial Day activities, and for this I used Fujifilm 400H. I’ve included some of the black and white photos — which were for the most part more successful than the color images — after the jump. You can also view the Flickr sets for my walk around Princeton and for my Memorial Day Activities.
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