Tales on Film

This was the first second hand camera I bought. From the moment my first roll of film was developed, I immediately fell in love with this beautiful camera.

The Mamiya C220 is a medium format twin-lens reflex camera that has been made in the early 1970′s with interchangeable lenses. The one I bought, came with the 80mm 2.8 lens. The Mamiya C220 accepts 120 and and 220 films.

What I like about this camera is the square 6×6 format, it focuses quite fast and the quality of the lens. Even in darker circumstances you can still take some beautiful pictures. You can find a series of pictures that I took with the Mamiya C220 in my Mamiya C220 flickr set.

Hamish Innes-Brown took this photo with a Mamiya c330 on Kodak portra 160nc at Tullamarine airport in Melbourne, Australia.

You can find some more in his amazing flickr-set and is also selling prints of these photos over on Redbubble

Found at Petapixel

Yesterday I witness something horrible in my mini studio. Apparently some of the rolls of Efke R 100, 120 film has teamed up, formed a mafia and is turning on the other films. Here is the full story. They are sneaking up on unsuspecting films, stripping them and stuffing them in my Mamiya RB67 backs.

This weekend I made a terrible mistake. I was photographing a barcamp meetup in Antwerp and decided to shoot exclusively on my Mamiya RB67, mind you I was there as a participant and not on a payed job. During the day the organisation approached me to ask if I wanted to take the groupshot of all the participants. I warned them it was film and that there was a small chance of not being able to produce photos, but they didn’t mind. So said, I went on shooting during the day, I shot with 2 backs 1 in b/w and 1 in color. For the group shot I even took the photo twice, one on each back, to make sure I would have at least one image turn out well.

Last night, when I started developing I was full of anticipation, because I knew I had taken some really nice shots. Lo and behold my surprise when I opened the developing container to find a blank roll of film. Not a problem, I thought, something went wrong with loading the film, but I have another one, which I was sure I loaded correctly. Imagine my surprise when I took the second roll out of the container and noticed that it too, was completely blank. I kinda freaked, checked if the text on the film was developed, it was. That ruled out the possibility that something went wrong during development. I also went back and checked the other roll, there too the text was developed, so it had to be something with the camera.

At that point I was thinking, that I had to replace my beloved camera because it broke down completely. After some tests, I noticed the shutter wasn’t firing, but the mirror went up. Slowly the cause of the problem started to form in my head. I had done something wrong myself. A bit of testing more revealed what happend. I had forgotten, after taking some pack shots earlier, to return the knob on the lens for mirror lock up to its original position. So every time I took a shot, the mirror went up, but the shutter stayed closed. Because I could hear the mirror, I assumed the shutter worked too. I shot all images without opening the shutter resulting in blank rolls of film. Lesson learned, that’s for sure, always check if you haven’t activated the mirror lock up before you make a shot.

Now I had to figure out how to tell the people of the event, that I did not have their group shot. I could have made excuses, but I figured it would be better just being straight about it and telling them I fr*cked up. So I tweeted an apology to everybody and got some understanding reactions about it, but not one bad one. So whenever you make a mistake, be honest about it. If you would have been payed for it, offer to pay back everything and even add some extra compensation for it. If you can go back and shoot it again, do that as soon as possible, free of charge. Just don’t lie about it or even worse hope they won’t notice it. If you don’t, you could end up like the guy in the picture.

I bought this camera at ebay for about 300 euro and I didn’t regret that for a minute. The RB67 pro-S is a single lens reflex leaf shutter medium format camera made from 1974 till the 90′s. It’s the successor of the RB67 pro and was later replaced by the RB67 Pro-SD. The unique part about this camera is that it has a Revolving Back, and with a normal back you take 6x7cm negatives, hence the name. It’s a fully manual camera with a leaf shutter in the lenses going from 1s to 1/400sec. The camera is built like a tank, it’s heavy, durable and you don’t need batteries to operate it.

I just love this camera, it’s not practically handy when you want to do street photography, because it’s way to heavy. For portraits, concepts and studio photography this camera is just awesome. It really love it the sharpness, the depth of field and the size of the negative, just everything about. If you ever have a chance to buy one, just do it.