night roaming

what do you do when it's a rainy night and you want to make some images? grab the fuji gw690, load it up with some kodak portra 400 and try to combine two of todd hido's masterpieces: roaming and house hunting. now, obviously, I am not todd hido, and my exposures were mostly guesswork - the rain didn't allow me to get out of the car and set up a tripod, so I was stuck with shooting handheld. this huge monster of a rangefinder camera can help you shoot really slow speeds when handheld - I was impressed with the results of shooting 1/8-1/4 handheld - the weight and size of the camera (plus the obvious absence of a mirrorbox) act as a stabilizer when you press the shutter.

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

...the amazing thing with the 6x9 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.