KISS!
Sometimes, you’ve just got to try the other side. One side may not offer enough! OK. Stop! Hold it right there. Get that smirk off of your face and your mind out of the gutter. This ain’t that kinda party, folks! Sheesh! When I said “going both ways”, I meant film and digital. What were you thinking? Well, the title ought to get the view count of this post pretty high! 
OK, so on to photography. I was going to blame Chris Klug for this, or give him credit. However, I just purchased another one of my fantasy cameras. At least from back in the day when I couldn’t afford it. A medium format camera. A Mamiya 645e with a 80mm/2.8 lens. I bought it off of eBay. This baby is clean and in mint condition. It even came with the original warranty card. Mamiya stopped making these in 2000. I got it for $345. In 2000, they sold for about $700 brand new. The size of the negative is 6 cm x 4.5 cm. Included with it were 2 rolls of B&W film, TMax 100, and TMax 400. For those of you not familiar with medium format, you get 15 shots / roll on 120 film, 30 shots on 220 film with this camera.
I got the camera nearly a week ago, but was thwarted by daily thunderstorms. Today, cloudy, but no thunderstorms. So, off to the beach I went. Folly Beach, SC. It was quite windy and the surf was up. The winds were blowing a continuous 15 – 20 MPH, with gusts up to about 30 MPH. It was a tad bit breezy.
I had decided to shoot exclusively film until I used all 30 shots, then I’d pull out the digital. Well, I almost made it, but I did take a few digital shots while I had the other camera on the tripod. There were some things unfolding a little further down the beach that I wanted to capture, so why not?!
The tide was pretty high, so I couldn’t really go down to the beach, but had to stay up on the sand dunes, but it was pretty fun anyway. I had no feedback. I had to trust that I’d get the shot. It was weird going back center-weighted metering and having the only thing in your display being a red L.E.D. read out of the shutter speed. Simplicity at it’s finest.
It took me slightly over 2.5 hours to take 30 shots. The rolls are sitting here waiting to be mailed. I have no idea how they will come out, but that’s some of the fun. I have 10 more rolls on the way. They should arrive tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll wait until I shoot 2 more rolls before mailing them off to Arizona to be processed.
I really enjoyed that outing. It was a nice break from auto focus, chimping, changing ISO’s, etc. Just me, the camera, and faith. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Oh, yeah! Since I’m coming out of the closet and everything … My name is Paul, and I shoot RAW, too. Ouch! That hurt!!!
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11 Responses to “The joy of going both ways”
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Well, your web traffic is about to go through the roof. Look out! This new camera certainly has let loose a mischievous version of Paul.
Congratulations on the new addition to the gear bag. It sounds as if you are going get more than your money’s worth in fun and satisfaction from this beauty.
Paul, you sound excited about your new medium format camera. That’s great! You know me, I’m all about new toys.
I look forward to seeing some of you’re first results scanned and posted here.
At this rate, we’ll have you carting around a 4×5 in another year or so
@Rakesh: I did that for a while. No thank you. It takes too long and costs too much per piece; however, the slides that you get back are glorious! I had a 4X5 that I shot for a couple of years. I hated it in the summer. Too much sweat was involved.
Paul if you are anything like me, I would rather see blood on my forehead than sweat. No 4×5 in my future. I also found a nice TLR Rolleiflex that I couldn’t afford back in the day and am working on doing more MF film work. I think I need to be retired to get the full enjoyment out of using film again. I am currently to impatient to wait for the developed film to be returned.
An added film friendly resource for you or your readers that I can highly recommend is Freestyle http://www.freestylephoto.biz/index.php based in CA. To me, reasonably priced mailers for developing, helpful staff that go out of their way to get items not normally carried and yes, they carry 620 roll film for that old Kodak Brownie you have thinking about pulling out of the closest and using again.
I look forward to seeing what you captured on film, but the digital image is very fine.
I look forward to “going both ways”.
It’s always fun to slip back to film. But Paul, you should break out your chemicals and tanks and process yourself! When I returned to film a few years ago, the cost of processing a roll of 120 film made me crazy (like $12-15 per roll, scanned). So I got a changing bag, a tank, and now the processing is done pretty much the same day as the shooting! Of course, it is usually many months between rolls!
Bob: I actually thought about doing that, but we’ll just see how it goes with these first few rolls. I remember doing it way back when and it was fun. Right now, I will send them to My Lab. They charge $4.00/roll plus $5.95 shipping/handling. I’ll send about 4 rolls at a time, giving me a cost of about $22, or $5.50/roll. I’ll do my own scanning. Of course, if I start to shoot a lot of film, I may make the investment to do it myself, but for right now, I don’t imagine that I’ll be shooting a whole lot … but you never know.
When I first saw the headline in my feed reader, I assumed the ‘both ways’ were portrait and landscape!
@Tara: You have a wonderfully clean mind.
LOL…you gave me a chuckle with this post.
Have fun with those “new” toys!
web live camera beach…
Any idea if there are similar blogs like this related to web live camera beach?…