Mamiya

New to Me: Mamiya C330

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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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Battle of Princeton Reenactment on Independence Day

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On Independence Day, I spent the morning and afternoon at Battlefield State Park in Princeton, New Jersey. The Princeton Battlefield Preservation Society presented a partial reenactment of the Battle of Princeton, a turning point for General Washington’s troops and Patriots during the Revolutionary War. The day was filled with a variety of demonstrations rather than an outright reenactment.

I decided to bring my Mamiya RZ67 Professional II camera to the event. While most spectators had digital cameras, my older medium format film camera seemed more appropriate. This camera — or any camera — is just as anachronistic as a digital camera, but it was fun to focus on a more manual process in this environment.

This manual process made the day fraught with frustrations for me. I would require a tripod to get the best shots, but carrying my tripod in addition to the camera from one spot to another was a pain. With so many spectators, I wouldn’t be able to get a good shot of the demonstrations without setting up in front of people who were there with their families to enjoy the day’s festivities. As a result, I ended up facing the backs of the subjects.

After giving up on the tripod, I tried holding the camera steady, which proved to be difficult with the cannon demonstration. The best timing would be right as the cannon fired, but each time, the noise startled me. I jumped, and had a difficult time holding the camera steady for the right moment. A small digital camera would have come in handy.

The film was developed by Taylor Photo in Princeton, New Jersey, and scanned at home with an Epson Perfection V700. Continue reading to see a few of the photographs, or see more by visiting this set on Flickr.

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Nothing Beats Medium Format

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The photographs I’ve posted so far have all been taken with a Canon Rebel XTi, a 10.1 megapixel digital camera several years old. It’s small for a digital SLR, so it’s easy to carry around, particularly when I limit myself to just a few lenses. But nothing beats shooting with a medium format camera, like my Mamiya RZ67 Pro II. It’s a huge camera and inconvenient to transport, especially while hiking on the Delaware & Raritan Canal State Park trails, but the image quality is fantastic.

These photographs were developed by a local lab, who also scanned the negatives. I have since purchased my own scanner (an Epson Perfection V700), so I’ll be doing my own scans less expensively in the future. These photographs were taken on the campus of Princeton University and on trails that follow the canal near campus.

I love the quality of the image I can get with medium format. I’ll of course need to keep practicing my photography skills to make the best use of this, but there is nothing better than taking the time to create an image with a camera that generates a highly-detailed negative. I suppose if there’s anything better than medium format, which puts 35mm and digital cameras with smaller sensors to shame, it would be large format.

Continue reading this post for some photographs or take a look at my Flickr collection dedicated to medium format photography.

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Portraiture Class

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A few weeks ago, I completed a class at the Arts Council of Princeton on portraiture, conducted by Peter C. Cook. Most of our class time was spent talking about portraiture, looking at photographs created by famous and non-so-famous individuals, and critiquing each other’s work.

We did, however, spend two sessions working with a model and one session in the darkroom developing our own black and white photography. This was my first opportunity to work with a model and my first time in a darkroom in the last twenty years. The last time I developed my own work was when I took a short session on black and white photography at summer camp as a kid.

I hope the model, Rebecca, doesn’t mind that I’m posting a few of my better shots (after the jump). My XTi produced the less appealing of all the photographs, so I won’t include them here. The best photographs came from my medium format Holga with black and white film and my Mamiya RZ67 Pro II with color negative film.

For the full collection, view the set on Flickr.

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