During one of my wildlife workshops back in the 90's, I photographed this adorable Canada lynx kitten with a medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67. Looking back on the challenges with this fully mechanical camera, it's amazing I used it for wildlife. The film advance, the focus, and the meter reading were all manual. I got 20 pictures on a roll of film, there was no preview by which I could judge the exposure (which meant I really had to know what I was doing!), all the lenses were a fixed focal length, and the fastest shutter speed on the camera was 1/400th of a second. Plus -- and this is the real kicker -- all of my shots were taken at 100 ISO. And this was double the film speed of what I used for landscapes and architecture. My settings were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/125, f/4.5, 100 ISO, and I probably used a 350mm lens which is equivalent to about a 200mm telephoto on a full-frame digital camera. Back then, due to the slow shutter speeds and the weight of the camera, I always used a tripod.
1 Comments
Aug 25, 2019, 9:48:52 AM
Bob Vestal - Hi Jim. Beautiful! You knew what you were doing for sure! It is kind of fun to work with film, and I am glad that I have some experience with it. However, not only is gear cumbersome, but it takes so much time to process and print or else wait for a lab to do it. And now it is expensive. However, hope the craft does not die. There does appear to be an increasing interest in analog photography.