My sister, May, 2009.
I got the two first rolls from my Yashica-Mat today after development and scanning. Sending it over the Atlantic wasn’t exactly the budget option, but I don’t own a film scanner yet, and I wanted to see that I wasn’t screwing up everything, which is hard to do from negatives alone. I’m a little proud of these rolls, artistic merit be damned, simply because they were the first I made with an all-mechanical, everything manual, fifty year old camera.
The scans are huge (around 23 megapixels), more than twice the pixel resolution of my digital, but you can see the grain clearly at less than 100 % magnification. I’m not sure if that’s a limitation of Kodak Portra 160NC, the scanner, the developer, the lens, or my exposure, surely not optimal. It’s still more than enough for my purposes, and besides, it’s part of the charm. I didn’t buy the camera to use it as a toycam, but I didn’t expect a Hasselblad either. The resolution ought to be better than my digital, too: its sensor area is 225mm2, while a 6x6 negative is 3136mm2, which works out to almost fourteen times larger.
I’ve made a bunch of mistakes, of course. Few of the exposures are optimal. The focus is often subtly wrong; on one of twenty-four exposures, I actually forgot to focus at all. I tried my best to hold it upright, but in several photos, I’ve clearly leaned the camera in one way or the other at the exact moment of exposure. Despite all that, there are far fewer “wtf did I even bother to take that photo?” moments on these rolls than I get on digital.
I like the waist-level finder, which, though it mirrors the finder image, gives much more of a feeling that you’re looking at the world than looking through a regular prism. I like the shutter: when you press it, all you hear is a gentle zip, unlike the cacophonous noise of an SLR mirror, and most people won’t notice that you’ve actually taken the picture. If I’m going to use medium format regularly, I’ll probably want to get one that has a built-in light meter, or at least a light, handheld one, since dragging along a large digital camera to meter is a pain and inhibits the process of actually making pictures. And a scanner. But I’m pleased so far.
