the resulting images were inevitably underexposed and I had to push the film a bit during scanning…

…the amazing thing with the 6×9 negative you get out of the fuji gw690 is that you can discover things you didn’t see when shooting a scene – for example, here’s a 100% crop of the fast 2000-dpi 28-megapixel scan I did of this image… somebody had spotted the erratic behaviour of my car and was watching/photographing me at the same time I was photographing this particular scene…

…on the move again, with white balance getting more difficult because I went up to 1/8 from 1/4 for fear of getting blurry images, thus underexposing the film even more…

…a frame that the lab guy chopped off on the left side…

…and here is the last frame, which left me wondering who to blame for the extra light leaks, the lab guy or my handling of the film – sadly for the lab guy, I will have to blame him, different lab than the one I usually trust my films to and first time I get frames chopped off and light leaks ruining my last frame (which becomes the first frame when unloading the film for developing)…

…and after shooting this handful of frames in the space of half an hour during a rainy night, I am officially hooked on night-time urban landscapes. coming soon near your suburb, on a tripod.

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 equipment I carried along was the usual stuff: the speed graphic, six 4×5″ film holders loaded with fomapan 100 and the bronica sq-a which had half a roll of fuji pro 400h 220 that I wanted to finish up. the funny part was that I had to ride the motorbike along with loukas to get to the motocross field – you can imagine the sight of two people on a single-seater ktm bike, the one fully dressed for motocross and the other carrying two photographic bags and a tripod.

we arrived at the field and sought for a nice spot to try and capture a jump, which worked out quite well (although even the speed graphic’s 1/1000 top shutter speed is not enough to “freeze” a motorbike that’s flying through the air next to you), but I didn’t give a lot of thought to the trees in the background – the resulting image would be a lot better if I had stayed clear of the trees, thus allowing the bike and the rider to stand out against a clear sky…

…then I tried the same framing with the medium format bronica sq-a (top shutter speed: 1/500) and the wide angle 50mm lens, choosing a lower angle and getting as close to the bike as I dared to…

…I spent a number of frames there (they came out identical, and I was pleased to see that I didn’t miss the bike on any photo) and moved on to some portraits, first with the speed graphic…

…then with the bronica, still using the wide-angle 50mm lens…

…a change of view and a lower angle in order to emphasize the bike…

…and then we moved on to a different spot, trying to find a higher “jumping point”. the sun was getting low and I wasn’t really trying to get the best out of the whole situation (thinking this was a warm-up session), so we didn’t search for a long time – we found the next jump and I readied the speed graphic again…

at that point I decided to switch from the hektor 150mm/f2.5 projector lens I was using to a proper lens, complete with an aperture diaphragm (the hektor doesn’t have any) and full 4x5inch frame coverage: the industar n-51 210mm/f4.5. this lens is a russian copy of the classic carl zeiss tessar design, originally used in russian 5x7inch view cameras, and cost me about 30€ including postage. I mounted it on the speed graphic, focused, closed down, set the shutter speed but when the time came to release the shutter, my cable release got stuck and only fired on the second try…

I thought that I never got the bike in the frame, so I reckoned I could re-do the shot on the same film sheet, essentially creating a double exposure. turns out I got the bike both times, the first time on the edge of the frame, the second time bang in the center. the image frame is exactly the same (since the camera stayed in the exact same place during both exposures) but the two captures of the bike are ghost-like, since it was the only object that changed its position during the double exposure…

time was running out and we both wanted to pack up and leave, so I decided to spend the remaining frames on portraiture. I got loukas against the setting sun and loaded the speed graphic with my last large format film sheet…

the industar 210mm/f4.5 is a normal photographic lens and has a bigger image cirle than the hektor 150mm/f2.5, thus explaining the absence of vignetting in these two frames, as well as the more conventional rendering of the out-of-focus areas.

finally, I finished the film in the bronica, still using the wide-angle lens…

we left the motocross field with a lot of discussion on how and when to do a proper motocross photo-session, but it wasn’t meant to be. next session I’m making with loukas will be named “spending two months with your ankle in a plaster cast“. have a swift recovery, man..!