Just Experimenting
SEPTEMBER 2021 ● JOURNAL
Recently, I discovered — by total accident — a new way to make photography interesting for myself. Taking photos hadn't become stale or anything like that, but I felt rejuvenated by what I had stumbled upon. I've been shooting 35mm film for years and only really started shooting medium format toward the end of last year. All of my 120 film has been advanced through the film back of my beloved Bronica ETRSi. I genuinely love that camera. BUT, it only provides 6x4.5cm frames; I was ready to take the next step and shop around for some new gear — something revered by the analog community, something tried and tested, and something that could provide those heavenly, 6x7cm frames, loaded with detail and potential. Ultimately, I landed on the Mamiya RB67 Pro-SD. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the legacy of this camera brand, or medium format film in general, the "RB" stands for "Rotating Back" (and the "67" refers to the frame size). Now this is especially handy for someone like me, who just happens to overwhelmingly shoot more portrait-oriented shots than landscape. Instead of rotating this beast of a camera and awkwardly contorting your neck to the side to peer into the jutting waste-level viewfinder, all you have to do is simply rotate the film back. It's fucking genius. And it's incredibly useful if you're using a waste-level viewfinder as opposed to a prism finder. So, instead of rotating the camera, just rotate the film back and you're golden — shoot away. Do your thing. And that's what I started to do.
Before I go any further, it should be noted that I've never used a waste-level viewfinder before. I've always relied on the metering within my 35mm cameras or the AE-III Prism Finder attached to my Bronica to guide me to the correct (or desired) exposures. So, this presented a bit of a challenge. I mean, I went ahead and downloaded a light meter app on my phone to help out, but it can be kind of cumbersome to use. You've gotta whip out your phone with one hand, holding this bulky-ass camera and lens in the other, and snap a shot of what you want to photograph. The app, after telling it what ISO you're shooting at, measures the light in the scene and provides you with a range of correct exposures based on what aperture or shutter speed you want to shoot at. Doesn't this kind of seem ironic in a way? Taking a photograph to then take another photograph? With a goddamn cell phone no less. Anyway, I've started to scrape and shovel my way through my own brain — unearthing several years' worth of knowledge and background in shooting film — so that way I don't have to paradoxically take a picture with a phone in order to figure out how to properly take a picture with my analog camera. And ya know what? Sometimes I fuck up. But a fair percentage of the time, I nail it and get the correct exposure just by eyeballing and examining the light around me and the subject.
Sometimes those fuck-ups actually produce something super rad and unexpected though. This all leads me to what I intially set out to discuss — that accidental discovery that as of late, has consumed my photographic quests. The first night I took that bad boy out for a spin (I'm talking about the Mamiya, folks), I was floored. I loaded up my bread and butter (CineStill 800T) and scoured Denver into the early morning looking for cool things to shoot. After I self-assuredly NAILED four or five photos with my new baby, I came to the realization that I was actually in fact somewhat of a buffoon. I hadn't taken the time to learn how to properly use my new camera. Those four or five shots were all exposed over the same strip of film — I had been advancing the shuttter lever, but not the film back lever. The resulting image, however, was unintentionally fucking cool. Ever since, I've been having fun just experimenting.
This article is featured in the ninth issue of the Y35 Mag. Check it out here.