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 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.

the result was a bit mixed, since these frames were long expired and some of them were slides that I chose to cross-process. moreover, all the frames spent the last months in room temperature, since it did not occur to me to return them to the fridge after loading them in the holders. turns out that some months in room temperature may indeed damage a 10-year-old film that’s been kept frozen for most of its life – so, a note to self: always load the film holders on the day before the shoot and always unload them after the shoot.

the b/w frames were fresh fomapan 100 film, no trouble there, and the medium format ektachrome 64t slide film which, although expired, was developed a couple of days after the shoot so it kept its character as much as possible (it went through a cross-process, too). another note to self: stop using cross-processing and stop buying up any weird film that comes along.

so, what about the actual photoshoot? well, let’s see… it was a sunny day during november and nicky was into the mood for photos, so we met near panathinaiko stadium and and walked in the woods above it. we only had one hour until sunset so we settled for some simple portraits, using the speed graphic and a leitz diaron 250mm/f4 projection lens. first, a kickstart b/w shot…

…next comes the cross-processed ektachrome 6122, a very old slide film…

…I’m guessing that the oversaturated yellow and red channels are a result of the cross-process, but since this is an 15-year-old film, I can’t really be sure…

…back to black & white, and the trusty fomapan 100…

…and seeing that such close-up portraits were a bit “stiff”, a change of clothes and style, and a little bit of colour – this time it’s kodak ektacolor gold 100, also a 10-year-old negative film, but since it was processed normally, the colours are mostly fine…

…no more colour film in large format, so back to fomapan…

…and then we’re totally out of large format film but we still got a bit of sunlight left, so why not try some experimental stuff? load the 6×7 back with some medium format ektachrome 64 tungsten film, bring out the leitz hektor 150mm/f2.5, a change of clothes again (in order to remove the striking red colour from the set) and let’s try double exposures…

…and that’s it. one hour of sunlight shining through the woods, enough time to shoot 12 frames of large format film plus 10 frames with the 6×7 roll film back and be a bit disappointed with the result – you just can’t rush these things.

the new year will see me moving back to medium format for a bit – its portability and speed are quite welcome during the winter – large format works better when your hands and your model are not freezing.

in may 2011 I was after an image for the lomography turns on time machine exhibition. the submission deadline was coming up fast and I had nothing that would fit the bill, so I decided to take the holga out for a session – I hadn’t used the holga for some months. I asked dear Kalli to pose for some portraits, and she agreed.

of course, I can never do a photo session without carrying at least three cameras (I have to find a cure for this), so I brought along the minolta xd-7 fitted with the 50mm/f1.4 lens as well as a medium format pinhole camera.

we shot two medium format films and maybe half a roll of the polypan f 50 which was loaded in the minolta – I never seem to be able to finish a 36-frame roll in a single session. I developed the two medium format films in the following days, but the 35mm film wasn’t finished – when I did finish it, a couple of weeks later, I was too bored to develop it by itself (small developing tanks can fit two 35mm films) so I left it in the cupboard, waiting to do for another roll of the same film – which, of course, I didn’t do until October.

…we arrived at a beach near Rafina with a couple of hours until sunset – the low sensitivity of the film (50 ASA) meant that if I stopped down the aperture I would get nice blurry images…

…it was a glorious day (although not quite summer yet), quite windy, and the beach was totally empty. Kalli set out to get some seashells and I just followed her around with the camera…

…then I started setting up the scene I wanted – I had re-used the clock in a close up image a couple of years ago and now I wanted a scene with the clock in the foreground and Kalli fading away in the foreground…

…but since this was a lomography exhibition, I needed to make this image with the holga – this is the resulting medium format image, shot on fuji acros 100 – quite different because of the holga’s bigger depth of field, the softness of its lens and the inherent low contrast of the film (fuji acros is a magnificent “slow” film)…

…the holga went back in the bag, its job done, and I continued fooling around with the shallow depth of field of the 50mm/f1.4 – the small 35mm format and this high-contrast, high-grain film make a nice combination against the setting sun.

I tried printing the last photo in the darkroom and it came out pretty nice – this film is a pleasant surprise, especially when you consider that it is a movie film, sold in 90 meter reels, quite thin (it has a polyester base) and costing something like 22€ for the 90m reel on ebay, resulting in a price of less than half a euro for a 36-frame roll.