Brave New World

The MPP Micro Technical Camera

Well I finally did it, I sold the Nikon DSLR and have bought a 4x5 camera. It's really a case of back to the future for me as I've gone back to the camera's I used 20+ years ago, and now all I have is digital wise access to the camera's owned by family members (for this blog)

Film! Are you mad?
Yes, folks to some I am. That sentence was an actual question asked of me whilst in a café with my children. A man about 10 years older than me saw my Rolleiflex sitting on the table-obviously he couldn't understand why in this day and age someone would use a camera from 1961.

I tried to explain why, but got the 'I have a Panansonic and a Macbook' statement as if I should have been even remotely impressed.
So why go film only? Well the easiest answer is that it does all I could possibly want it to do, I don't need instant review as I know pretty well how the image will look; I don't care for speed of operation––the type of photography I do just doesn't need those things.

Film is Expensive
To a degree it is, obviously you need to choose what film to take on a trip and the cost is ongoing which means when I press the shutter it has a pretty obvious cost.
What I can say though is for the type of images I take you don't need to fire off many images, most shoots are planned so a mornings work might involve 4-6 sheets of 4x5 or a couple of rolls of 120 and those outings amount to fewer than one per month so that would be 40-50 sheets per year and 20 rolls of 120 from which in that year I'd expect 15-20 prints. The total cost all in would be about £250 for the film and as I process my work the chemicals probably about £30.
So less than £300 normally without prints obviously.
That sounds pretty expensive, after all with only 20 good finished images that works out to £15 per image!

Why sell my  Digital Nikons?
In all honesty I wasn't using them; the batteries would go flat between times meaning spontaneous shots were sometimes done with cameraphones.
I liked digital but it just doesn't suit my use patterns and when shooting 50 very high quality shots a year doesn't make a £2000 DSLR a good purchase over its lifetime (over ten years of film for existing cameras).
So I managed to sell them while they still had some value.

Moving Forward
At the moment the films I want to use are still available, I don't feel the need to change my shooting style or workflow or adapt them to fit the direction everyone else is heading in. In fact there might even be a perverse pleasure in swimming against the tide of people adopting fast and ever changing technologies.
Just give me a supply of Ilford B&W and Kodak Ektar and I can be happy and creative.

Medium Format Acquisition

For a while now I've been looking for a good MF camera, my first thought was a Mamiya RB 6x7 then I became interested in a Fuji 6x9, but while waiting for those cameras to come in second hand locally, my dealer offered me this.

A Pentax 6x7
This camera can only be described as a Behemoth, it's like a regular 35mm SLR but just twice the size and weight. That's fine though because the film size is more than 4 times bigger and the resulting quality is amongst the best MF available, the Pentax lenses are also well regarded especially the later 'SMC' type.
I have only put a couple of rolls though the camera so far, and first impressions are pretty good. Handling wise the camera is what you'd expect, just like a large 35mm SLR. The shutter though is pretty loud especially after the 'mirror-less' Leica rangefinders I've been using of late. Another worry for me is that this is the model without the mirror lock up, so I'm not sure how vibration will affect picture quality so 1/250 is about the minimum shutter speed I dare hand hold.
Pictures taken with the camera I've nicknamed 'The Beast' will follow.

Taken on T-Max 400 with 150mm lens

Taken with 90mm lens on Fortepan 100
All images and text © Mark Antony Smith 2007