I was expecting the place to be empty on such an early time and I was planning to set up mariane in front of zappeio hall and let the speed graphic work its magic… but, surprise surprise, the leader of a political party had arranged a gathering there and the place was teeming with politicians, voters and police officers. so, plan b, we headed straight into the trees.

the time frame was quite tight, we had less than two hours before mariane had to go, and I settled with getting simple, natural portraits. straight on, I loaded up the bronica sq-a with a roll of kodak tri-x 400 and tried to catch the light that was filtering through the trees.

…then on to some against-the-light portraits…

…and as the tri-x roll came to an end (I was out of b/w film, too, just two rolls with me) I set up the speed graphic, paired it with the leitz hektor 150/f2.5 and looked around for some background that begged to get creamcheesed… I had some film holders loaded up with fomapan 400 and a couple loaded with expired kodak epn 6122 color duplicating film…

…it took me some days before I decided to develop the color films (always bored of heating up the chemicals), but the result was well worth it – expired cross-processed slide film, cheap as hell, kinda unpredictable but not without its merits…

…we’d already spent one and a half hour, what with the extra time needed for each large format shot, so I figured out it was time to pack up the speed graphic and go back to the bronica. the second b/w roll I had with me was kodak t-max 100 – two stops slower than tri-x but sporting a lot more of detail in the midtones….

…and that was it, we packed up and left just as that bloody politician was starting his speech. in total, 24 frames of medium format and 8 frames of large format were shot in the course of two hours. next time it’s gonna be longer, with more large format shots, which are a pain in the ass to set up but quite wonderful if they come out as planned.

…and here are the resulting images up until today, namely the following artists: monsieur minimal, marietta fafouti, tilemachos moussas, giorgis christodoulou, simon bloom, marika klambatsea, thanos anestopoulos. you can also check each artist’s interview (greek language, couldn’t be anything else) in the link under their name.

monsieur minimal

[christos' interview]

marietta fafouti

[marietta's interview]

tilemachos moussas

[tilemachos' interview]

giorgis christodoulou

[giorgis' interview]

simon bloom

[simon's interview]

marika klambatsea

[marika's interview]

thanos anestopoulos

[thanos' interview]

my speed graphic was stranded on the sidelines, resting on a service table somewhere in the netherlands (the repair went fine and the camera is now on its way back to athens), so Ι fell back to 135 and 120 film. the minolta xd-7 was already loaded with some polypan f 50, and I hadn’t aired the bronica sq-a for a really long time, so I took it along.

we arrived at the seaside early, but the sunlight was too harsh and I really get baked in direct sunlight (my body has a blown fuse when it comes to high temperatures), so we relaxed in the shadow until the sun was two hours away from setting, and the light had become more mellow – the golden hour.

I am quite wide-angle and static when doing large format portraits, but the 35mm format allows for fast pace and extreme close-ups – I tend to default to tight portraiture in such occasions, getting the most out of the 50mm/f1.4 lens…

…of course I still have the wide-angle bug in me, and wide-angle lenses really like big open spaces…

…and back to cream-cheese-the-hell-out-of-the-background territory…

a couple of dogs were around, they weren’t exactly friendly…

…the sun was getting lower by the minute…

…and when I finished the half-full roll in the minolta, I took out the bronica, loaded it up with a roll of ilford fp4+, fitted the zenzanon 150mm/f3.5 on it and I was back to square portraits after months of working with non-square formats…

I need to get these negatives to the darkroom – they will print nicely, and also contact sheets would be nice. 20-something images in the 35mm roll and 12 images in the medium format roll, almost all of them based on different aspects of the same face, they will make up good contact sheets.

I sent my speed graphic to jo lommen in the netherlands for a shutter service… I have been trying to make a decent post about the speed graphic for a long time – I never managed it because I always wanted to take some good clean backstage photos of a shoot and I never did invest the time in it, since I much preferred trying to get a good photograph with the speed graphic, instead of getting a good photograph of it. so, I will have to make a post about my favourite large format camera using a picture of my previous speed graphic, the anniversary model, and hoping to update the post when my current pacemaker model comes back.

the lens fitted on the anniversary is the leitz hektor 150mm/f2.5, a projection lens meant to be used with the leitz pradovit medium format projectors. its image circle barely covers 4×5, but I like the vignetting and the really soft corners it produces. you could actually say that I choose to destroy all the potential of the large format film surface by using such a low resolution funky lens, and you would be right. however, it’s the final image that matters, not its resolution or its sharpness. I consider technical perfection the most boring aspect of photography, if it can’t capture atmosphere.

and boy, can it capture atmosphere… this camera/lens combination is ideal for open space full body portraits (it is considered wide-angle in large format, after all), which I tend to do a lot, always using horizontal framing (photojournalistic habits die hard)…

…it can also do tighter frames, where it still retains the vignetting/soft corners combo. it’s easier to focus properly when moving closer because you get to see a bigger image of your subject – proper ground glass focusing needs a dark-cloth, a loupe and patience and I only have two out of three…

…and then you have other barrel lenses, then ones considered “short portrait lenses”, in the >200mm range, losing a bit of light due to smaller apertures but gaining in sharpness and resolution. my most used ones are the leitz diaron 250mm/f4 and the industar-51 210mm/f4.5 (this one actually has a aperture diaphragm, as opposed to the leitz lenses which you can only use at their maximum aperture). they are both great performers for close-ups and, since they have a much bigger image circle than the hektor, you also lose the vignetting and the soft corners…