night roaming pt II

inspired by todd hido, I tried some night shots back in march 2012. they came out interesting, so I tried another film roll in june. this time, however, I placed the resulting images aside, expecting to shoot some more in the following days. this never happened. summer came and went, autumn brought new projects and an exhibition and now here I am, the year is ending, I am mainly shooting large format and I don't think I'll continue this little project (at least on the 6x9 format). the night lighting transforms the suburban scenery quite a bit, and driving around in quiet, empty roads can be quite rewarding. now, the right way to go about doing this is using the largest format available, a tripod and long exposures. I wasn't really in the mood of setting up a tripod, so I used the fuji gw690 and relied on slow handheld exposures and the latitude of medium format film.

all of the following images were shot on fuji pro 400h film. they came out inevitably underexposed, so I pushed the film a bit during scanning.

thirty-five minutes of morning light

the good thing about marousi is that it's cool during the summer night, and really quiet. it's an ideal place if you sleep lightly and cherish the night breeze. thus, it is only natural that murphy's law would apply - a perfect situation will always be disrupted by something surreal. up until a month ago, it was a rooster from the garden 20 meters away from my bedroom window. just as I noticed that the rooster had expired and gone to meet his maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible, a new night-time torture began - the stork had blessed the house next to the garden with a newborn baby... so, yesterday morning I was woken up at 06:30 by the baby's crying. actually, the baby had been crying all night long, but that last bit got me fully awake, the sun was up, it was getting hotter, I just couldn't sleep again. so... I decided to capitalize on the morning light. I loaded up the fuji gw690iii with a roll of kodak portra 400 - I have been scouting the area around my house for a long time, so off I went, checking how familiar places were illuminated by the morning sun. the light meter was indicating a combination of 1/125 & f22, pretty good depth of field for the monster 90mm lens of the fuji.

7:23

the first frame was a no-brainer; I raced to my favourite scene and - lo and behold! - the daihatsu had not moved an inch. the sun was still too low, though, and I had to use a different angle because I kept getting my shadow in the photograph. one day I will make a book out of that daihatsu, really.

7:28

I kept cruising around, watching the shadows and the sun, when I saw another car scene that had dwelt on my mind recently - this abandoned fiat in the middle of a big empty piece of land was screaming for a portrait.

7:31

right back to another favourite place, an impromptu parking area, what greeks call "αλάνα" (and if you can find a proper english translation, I'll buy you a drink). I hoped to find a big truck here, the one I had photographed some days ago, but it was nowhere to be seen, so I had to settle for the only car available.

7:33

I immediately knew what the next scene would be - another place I've photographed in the past (although I still haven't developed that film), a nearby basketball court. the sun was still too low but the clock was ticking, so I snapped a frame and made a mental note to come back another day at 08:30 or something.

7:42

I was out of familiar places, no more pre-imagined scenes, and I had to push deeper into areas I had not scouted before - found this building, cursed the early time, this is another photograph that could be better at 08:30, snapped away, moved on.

7:46

uninspired by the places around me, running against the clock (the great deceiver...), more cars and people around, still three frames to go until the end of the roll, I decided to keep it simple - after all, everybody loves stop signs... don't you?

7:51

back to more open spaces, not much shadow play, but the sunlight was still sweet and kept giving a marzipan feeling to the buildings... had to snap away at something, looked around, a big white rectangle begged for a photograph.

7:58

the streets are getting crowded - it's the morning zone, and I still have one more frame before I can wrap this up. driving back to the daihatsu, I notice it has visitors. I'm thinking that there must be a place somewhere nearby where I can get a more interesting image than this, but my time is up, the opel twins wink their eyes at me, what the hell, they deserve a photo.

...later the same day, a trip to filmora for development, back home for scanning - always keep your head in the shade, the sunlight kills you and your photos during normal day hours - and here it is: thirty-five morning minutes, eight frames of sweet sunlight. I'm starting to like the neighbours' baby.

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.

enter the texas leica

for the past months I was looking for a fast hand-holdable eye-level larger-than-6x6 camera. I've had my fair share of medium format SLRs and I wanted a camera I could easily carry with me, fast to take out of the bag, fast to focus and shoot - a rangefinder medium format camera. ideally this would be the mamiya 7 or the plaubel makina 67, but they kept staying out of my budget, so I looked around to the fuji rangefinder cameras. enter the fuji gw690iii - a 6x9 rangefinder camera with a fixed 90mm/f3.5 lens (considered normal to roughly wide-angle for 6x9), 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 6x9 negative it's producing) but still fits easily in my messenger bag, and it's less cumbersome and heavy than my 6x6 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, 6x9 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.