I don’t yet have all of the needed facilities at home to process films, so I’m having to do that using the darkroom at university. I recently processed the film I took last year when I visited the luthier.
The intention of that visit was linked to a course project about ‘how we are’ and I was photographing people who have ‘different’ occupations or interests.
I was limited to ambient light, so shutter speeds were on the long side, resulting in motion blur. I think the results showing the luthier working with a file are quite interesting. The hands are blurred by movement, but the sawdust is sharp as are some of the teeth on the file.
I have shot some test images for another project. These are test landscape shots using a 50mm wide-angles lens and a 180mm short telephoto lens. The intention here was to keep overall exposure static but test various focal ratios.
The most recent film was another test, this time test portrait shots using the 180mm lens. The ‘crop’ factor compared with 35mm full-frame is 0.5 so a 180mm lens on the Mamiya has the field of view equivalent of a 90mm lens, which is good for portraiture.
For both of these, the final processing was digital. The first film was scanned using a flat-bed scanner, the second was photographed using a Lumitrans. The light was not ideal for the portraits as I was shooting into it more-or-less, which has definitely affected the images.
I did take some digital images as well, mostly to test some off-camera lighting options.
The next run with the RB67 should be the main shoot for the project.