so there I was, new year’s eve, just another saturday for some people (just me, I guess), clouds, rain, cold – a perfect day to visit the seaside. I loaded the minolta with some really old kodak panatomic-x film, decided to also take out the kiev 88 with the flektogon 50mm/f4 (I don’t get a lot of time with wide-angle lenses), threw some medium format films in the bag and jumped in the car.

rafina is a nice place for winter seaside walks, the clouds were lining the sky and the colours were perfect for photographs… at that point, I realized that I hadn’t brought any colour films with me apart from a slide film meant to be used with tungsten lighting… I wasted a minute in cursing and pitying myself and then decided to try my best… in the end you could say that my best wasn’t good enough – lesson to self: buy a big stash of kodak portra and always carry some of them. you just can’t beat colour film for anything remotely resembling a landscape.

anyway, photos. an attempt on a simple I-can-focus-really-close view of the beach…

…then this crazy guy came crashing through the sand…

…it’s always nice to find interesting bits and pieces that people throw away, although it’d be nicer if you never found any kind of litter on a beach (and that proves that I can be politically correct if I want to)…

…then a typical I-have-shot-this-too-but-it-looks-better-in-colour frame taken during my superhuman attempt to finish the roll, which didn’t happen anyway, since I was still in the middle of it…

…and this is the only shot from the kiev 88 roll that has some interest, although most of its interest lies in imagining how different it would be if it was a colour shot…

…that was the end of new year’s eve photo walk, a searing, majestic session of uninspired photos that had the bad luck of being a black & white peg in a colour hole. thirty frames were shot on new year’s eve, most of them died because of lack of any kind of photographic interest.

but you always have to try some things twice, so on new year’s day I returned to the same beach to finish the 35mm roll. this time it was a little better, and I tried to get some movement in my frames…

…and you gotta love people walking their dogs on the beach – when combined with a super-slow 25 ASA film, you get the chance to imitate michael ackerman, or that other what’s-his-name-guy who first shot a moving dog…

so that’s it, a weekend of enjoyable walking by the sea and not so enjoyable photographs. hell, at least I cay say that 2011 left, 2012 came and I was still trying to finish one roll of film – one more story to tell my children (or somebody else’s children, anyway). I have to point out that I learn from my mistakes, though – my next trips to the seaside were shot exclusively in colour.

moreover, I am painfully trying to master large format portraiture, which is a quite different beast than medium format, a lot less flexible, totally tripod-bound and requiring extreme patience and composure from the model and the photographer alike.

so, it’s summertime, the concerts are over, I have extra free time and a need to get my speed graphic out on the field for a proper, calm and composed portraiture session.

enter miss eliza. she’s a dream, a muse, a girl who understands my driving need and can keep still when I ask her to, while she’s a most enjoyable personality when not posing. it’s a hot sunday evening and we go up to a favourite location of mine: hotel xenia on top of parnitha. it’s an old building that started as a sanatorium 90 years ago, became a hotel in the mid-60s and now lies abandoned and defaced.

I had four cameras with me – the speed graphic fitted with the hektor 150mm/f2.5 for large format, the medium format bronica sq-a fitted with the zenzanon 80mm/f2.8, the polaroid land camera 250 and a 35mm minolta xd-7 that I intended to use as a lightmeter.

before setting up the tripod for the speed graphic, I took a couple of frames with the polaroid – the positives are  good but they cannot be compared with the negatives, which acquire a lot of random “textures” during the bleaching process.

…then I put the speed graphic on the tripod and spent 5 minutes trying to arrange the framing. tripod photography is even more time-consuming if you have to frame and focus through an upside-down ground glass image. took two identical frames (better safe than sorry) and then decided to take out the bronica.

…on medium format everything is so much easier, framing, changing the angle of view, moving closer or further, catching momentary expressions or even the wind. and the ilford fp4+ does a very good job against the light, keeping a lot of detail in the shadows.

…with the 12-frame roll finished, it’s time to go back to the speed graphic… and the first picture is an example of how you can lose your framing if you spend a long enough time on correctly focusing the razor thin depth of field of a f2.5 lens on large format.

…while the second picture really shows you the 3D effect of this particular lens/format combination. on both the images the fomapan 100 film holds up very well against the sun. very good large format film, especially considering its low price.

….and that’s it. all in all we shot 22 frames in two hours: a medium format film, 8 large format sheets and 2 polaroid peel-apart frames. the only post-processing that was applied to the above images was burning/dodging and of course manual scratch and dust removal – I’ve yet to find a scanner that cleans itself as well as the negatives before scanning.

…of course 35mm film is more difficult to align than medium format film.

I know it’s dark for good
I never listen when I should
you only see in black and white
so go on back to your own kind
and I’ll go back to mine.