I’ve finished working on the film images I took in Sicily. One of the cameras I was working with was a newly released medium format folding film camera (Voigtlander Bessa 667). It’s a new take on an old style of camera and thought it might interesting to work with given the themes of my project. It’s definitely fun to carry around an shoot with, and draws quite a bit of attention because it seems so antique (and yet not). I even enjoyed not being able to see the image as soon as I shot it. The romance of having to wait for the film to be processed (and in my case having to wait quite a while as I had to get it done in London) was nice. Mind you, scanning (on my low-end scanner) was a total pain, and removing all the dust specks in photoshop more so…
You can check out the images here. I shot with Fuji Neopan 400, possibly not the best choice of film for the bright Sicilian sun, but I think the camera held up okay. I’ve done minimal post processing in PS5. There’s no cropping, just level and exposure adjustments. I’ve included almost all that I shot and while they’re not all keepers I thought it would be instructive to note how the camera (and I) performed.
I’m not sure I like the end results as much as I wanted to. There’s something about the 6×7 format that doesn’t feel quite wide enough for me. The lack of control over composition is another frustration (unlike an SLR, where you’re looking through the lens directly at what the photo will frame, a rangefinder system gives you a viewfinder that’s calibrated to estimate what the lens is framing – apologies for the techno-babble if you already knew this, or, you know, don’t really care…) Both of these issues would probably be ameliorated if the lens was wider. It’s 80mm lens (equivalent to a 50mm on a 35mm SLR) and just doesn’t cover as much of a scene as I’d like.
But a worthwhile experiment nonetheless.
Tags: august 2010, bessa667, bw, photography, wooden box