After almost 10 years I’ve decided to post again on an occasinal basis. This will be a lot of random stuff….lots has happened in 10 years, but I thought it would be fun to share some of the stuff I’ve taken and been doing.
A few years back I was in Hong Kong for the 7’s tournament. I took a film camera I picked up on ebay with me to experiment with. It’s not a common camera and I’ll post about it some more if there is interest. The camera is a Da Yi 6×17 panoramic camera with a Schneider-Kreuznach 90mm f/8 Super-Angulon wide angle lens and a Copal-0 shutter. The camera shoots 6cm x 17cm frames on 120 roll film. You get 4 shots per roll! I took it up Victoria peak for a blue hour shot and set it all up. It’s a beast of a camera and composing on the ground glass is a stone cold bitch in low light. I needed the camera level in pitch, roll and yaw, which limits the composition a bit. Then there is the limited dynamic range of the film I was shooting – Provia F 100, where the brightest highlights are blown out and the deepest shadows block up. The lens is very good, but the light fall off at the extreams is tough. Slide film is very unforgiving with a narrow exposure latitude, but it has a quality all of it’s own. It’s been a long time since I shot a roll of film and I’d forgotton how spoiled I’ve become. Still, I made a fair go of it and I eventually processed the film and scanned it, resulting in the image above. It wasn’t perfect conditons, with some haze, but overall I’m quite pleased with the result. I can crop it a bit to remove the film rebate, but I rather like it as it is. It does print quite nicely.
The shot below is the same thing, but shot with my Fuji X100F. I missed the blue hour proper due to messing with the Da Yi, but I had so much more flexibility and control. I shot with the WCL converter, stacking images by panning left to righ with 1/3 overlap. I shot 11 frames with the horizon dead center in a single pass, with the camera mounted vertically, stitched in Lightroom. Unusually for me I didn’t bracket exposures and stack the result to drag a little more detail out of the shadow and highlights, but I was now in a hurry to get off the mountain.
The colour shift from left to right, going from warm to cool is a bit odd, but it’s real. look in the forground bottom right and you can see the same white balance was used, just Hong Kong being weird.
Because of the control I get with digital, I get more detail and resolution than the film/scanner combo. Being able to mount the camera vertically give me a larger base image to work with and crop to my satisfaction. If I’d been there to shoot blue hour with the Fjui, I’d have bracketed exposures and been able to work the image to be more to my liking.
Shooting with the Da Yi is an experience. It’s fun to go back to film, although relearning those hard won lessons is not the most civil prospect. Whiile I enjoyed the experience, and I’ve used the Da Yi a couple more times since then, I think I’m going to sell it on. Not that I’ve lost the passion for shooting film, on the contrary, it’s made me want to shoot more! The limited functionality of the camera really makes it less fun than I thought it would be. I can acheive great results digitally and as I’m scanning the images to process anyway, it doesn’t give me the intangible quality I used to enjoy from shooting film.
If film is your passion, something like the Da Yi might work for you, dependng on your subject. I’d prefer to shoot something like a 5×7 with a rollfilm back for the occasional pano as that would give me a lot more flexibility, if I didn’t have the digital option. For now, for pano’s, I’ll stick with the X100F. That still my go to machine.
More to come….