thodorismarkou.blog » thodoris markou

mogwai, 21/01/2012

thodoris markou — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:35:53 +0000

kwoon

mogwai

arch enemy, 20/01/2012

thodoris markou — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:17:37 +0000

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arch enemy

ella-s fashion atelier

thodoris markou — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:19:38 +0000

spent last evening trying to organize my archive, and I came upon a photoshoot I had done for fashion designer ella-s. this was back in early 2010 and I wasn’t too strong with analog then, so I went with digital for the main photoshoot. still, I snapped away one roll of black & white film with my mamiya c220 (this was also before I decided to clean it – during that process I screwed up the focusing plane… the camera is still out of order, I’m gonna have to send it for repair one of these days).

there’s no artificial lighting in these photos, I only used a reflector in some of them.

antonia kallimoukou is the wonderful model, I still remember her walking fully-dressed towards the grocery store in kolonaki and one woman exclaiming “my god, she’s so beautiful”. another guy mistook the whole wedding dress situation for a real wedding and wished her a full and happy life.

out of the 12 frames on the medium format roll, these came out nice…

…and here’s the digital shots, for reference. now that I’m thinking about it, it’s a shame I didn’t shoot more film that day. I mean, I keep imagining the candle frames with film and they would have come out great… (to this day, I still can’t choose between the two candle frames, so I’m presenting both.)

enter the texas leica

thodoris markou — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:27:09 +0000

for the past months I was looking for a fast hand-holdable eye-level larger-than-6×6 camera. I’ve had my fair share of medium format SLRs and I wanted a camera I could easily carry with me, fast to take out of the bag, fast to focus and shoot – a rangefinder medium format camera. ideally this would be the mamiya 7 or the plaubel makina 67, but they kept staying out of my budget, so I looked around to the fuji rangefinder cameras.

enter the fuji gw690iii – a 6×9 rangefinder camera with a fixed 90mm/f3.5 lens (considered normal to roughly wide-angle for 6×9), nicknamed “texas leica” because it looks like a leica rangefinder’s big brother, with cowboy hat and boots on, something the stranger from big lebowski would carry.

it’s a big beast (has to be, what with the 6×9 negative it’s producing) but still fits easily in my messenger bag, and it’s less cumbersome and heavy than my 6×6 SLRs. its leaf shutter and the absence of a mirror box means that I can get my shutter speeds as low as 1/15 without breaking a sweat. moreover, 6×9 means I get the same 3:2 image ratio I’ve been using on my 35mm cameras, and only 8 frames on a roll of 120 film.

but how does it perform, portrait-wise? well, I loaded it up with an expired roll of kodak portra 400nc and went out for a windy seaside walk with the dear sisters, miss d. and miss m. – the wind battled us in every step we made and I learned a valuable lesson: your camera, your clothes and your car can get really salty after a couple of hours walking next to the breaking waves, even if you don’t get a single drop of water on you.

this camera is definitely a different experience than SLR/TLR 6×6. the four-years-past-the-expiry-date film riddled the photos with streaks of discoloration, but I couldn’t care less. miss d. is starring in all of the following photographs.