Classic Cars, Medium Format

After my Japan trip and some much-needed recovery time, I took in a classic car show in Port Costa, California, with my Pentax 6X7. I had just, a couple nights before, picked up the 135mm close-up lens (it's called a macro lens, officially, but only magnifies to 1:4 in-lens, making it a close-up lens). So this was a great chance to try it out. I brought slow film (which I've found I like for digitizing but not darkroom printing because the grain is too small to focus on with a grain focuser.)


The 6X7, any time I take it out, garners some attention. So I bought a T-shirt with a print of the 6X7 on it to wear when I use the 6X7 in the future.
The 105mm proves, here, that it's just a fantastic lens.


The 6X7 weighs so much that two weekends ago after a five-hour walk with it around the Castle Air Museum (those photos will come later this year or early next), my back was sore for six days. I'm also, in related news, a wimp.
One of my first shots with the 135, I was surprised to see how much it compresses the for- and background.


Because the 6X7 doesn't require cropping to fit 8X10 prints, the entire negative can be enlarged. Unlike 6X4.5 formats, such as the Hassleblad and many other cameras, this provides a lot of image efficiency and creates a higher effective lens resolution. That said, the 6X7 lenses are lpmm for lpmm basically as good as Hassleblad and Zeiss lenses.
The 55mm, at f3.5, provides a nice, shallow focal plane and exaggerated depth perception.


The Canon F-1 had the most components of any system camera ever made. The Nikon F line has the most professional film cameras in the line. The Pentax 6X7, however, takes far better pictures than either because of the negative size alone. To put it in perspective, if a 35mm frame were 8.6 megapixels (2,400 X 3,600 pixels for 24mm X 36mm) then a 6X7 image would compare to a 42 megapixel image (6,000 X 7,000 pixels for 60mm X 70mm.) So medium format captures much greater detail and tonal range.
The 55mm proves that it's very good for subject isolation.


Modern DSLRs cram tinier pixels into the same sensor size with each new version. This leads to reduced image quality at many of the smaller apertures. Also, this actually leads, to my eyes, to reduced tonality and color range. I suspect that each pixels records color data less truly.
Again the 55mm, the lens I use the most in my 6X7 kit.


Rendering in ways I can only (and often) describe as cinematic, the 55mm f3.5 captures light better and more nicely than any other lens I own. The 31mm and 77mm FA Limiteds may be sharper and more contrasty, but the 55mm seems to just grab light and direct it efficiently and attractively.


I shot this inside, hand-held, and 1/8th or 1/4 of a second, I forget which. Note that in the window there's some faint tree detail. The dark shadows here to faint tree detail represent more than nine spaces on the exposure index scale. Tmax 100 -- it's taken a long time for me to get used to it and to say I like it, but I do. I still prefer Plus-X 125, but that film is quickly disappearing and not to be found in medium format at all any more.


Another photo, not an enlargement from above.

Old Film, Not Great Results

I shot a roll of Kodak Tri-X that expired no more recently than the mid-to-late 1980s the other day. I exposed it as 320 ISO to give a bit more light to this old film stock. That, however, did not help the results too much as this post will show. The camera was my new (to me) Pentax 6X7 MU that I picked up in Milwaukee a couple weeks ago. This roll used the 55mm 1:3.5 lens. Today I took this same combo out with a half-used roll of Fuji Velvia 50, images that should be back from the lab in a couple weeks. This shot turned out, I think, the best from this roll from a technical standpoint. However, I thought I was metering the statue, not the background. A statue in Embarcadero Center. I forget which one of these similar statues this is. Let me correct that. I remember that this is the dude, but I forget who this statue depicts. The other of these similar statues Getting past this images obvious technical issues, this lens renders closeups at shallow angles with fast background drop offs in an interesting way that I need to experement with some more. Ghandi says 'sup.' California Street Canyon, a typical 'roll killer' for me. Just a shot of reasonable predictability with which to end a roll. Of course, I had one more shot after this, so I took it again. This image has a few problems. 1- I loaded the film a little further back than I should have, so this 6X7 image was more like 6X5. Therefore, 2- I didn't have any space at the end of the roll with which to attach the clothes pins for drying, hence the clothes pin damage along the bottom. Oops. Lessons learned: The 6X7 is a bit tricky for loading film, so I need to be more careful than normal.

Mary Dyer: Quaker

The church I grew up in keeps a small, maybe 18-inch, statue of Mary Dyer in the foyer. In 1660, Puritans hanged Mary Dyer in Boston for violating a law which banned Quakers from the Bay Colony (the former name for the State of Massachusetts.) The statue at my church is a miniature version of the life-size Mary Dyer statues sculpted by Sylvia Shaw Judson (the miniature versions of this statue vary slightly from the original.) The original sits in front of the Massachusetts state house with a copy in the Friends Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; a third copy is at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

The Judson statue, unveiled in Massachusetts in 1959, portrays Dyer in silent Quaker worship. Dyer, portrayed in the simple, dark garb common to friends of the 17th century, sits meditatively and in a manner designed to convey her simple resolve: To protest unjust law. In the end, the hangings of Mary Dyer and three other Quakers led King Charles II to force the Bay Colony to repeal the anti-Quaker law. This action could arguably be viewed as a large part of why America today has freedom of religion and is not a Puritan church-state.

Return to Limestone Mary

Last October on an early morning walk in Libertyville, Illinois, I came across some monuments. Most were standard headstones, but one was a statue of Mary made of limestone or concrete, I'm not sure which. I prefer to think she's carved in limestone. This occurred before I began this blog, so here are some of the photos I took that day. I used either my Nikon F3 with my Tokina 28-200 SZ-X lens and Walgreen-brand 200 ISO film or my Pentax K-7 with my Sigma 35-80mm lens. The first ,second, and fourth were taken with the Nikon and Walgreens film. Pretty great what film can do, right? The images are a bit softer than the digital, with less sever acutance and more blending across the subject. There's also a flaw in the film that caused the last one to have a weird redness, but let's not focus on that. A key need for all new cameras is to shoot a test roll. This determines if the camera works properly and detects and leaks in the light seals. So the Pentax 6X7 I bought came with two rolls of film -- Ilford 125 Plus-X and Ilford PNAF 50. Both expired in early 1998, so I had little hope they would provide good images. However, they would be good test rolls. I shot the 125 first, exclusively on Limestone Mary, at 100 ISO to compensate for the aging. Here are some shots. As you can see, the camera works. But more than the shots, these images work well because the monument is so well made. I admit I'm not Catholic, so images of Mary don't emotionally affect me like they may other people, but this statue gets me because of its quality. It has such detail that, as you can see in the last image, it looks as though it could be a real person walking in a field, reaching out to touch flowers as she walks past. It's an amazing statue.