Some film from the RB67

I'm taking a brief interlude from the Cambo 4x5 to revisit the Mamiya RB67. I shot a roll of Fuji Reala and Kodak Verichrome at the Renaissance Festival. I really like the results. The RB is such a heavy camera and I was winging it around with one arm while shouldering a gadget bag on one side and my Nikon Digital on the other.

That's pretty harsh duty. I really need to bite the bullet and take ONLY the RB on one of those trips--that's a hard leap of faith to make anymore.

I'm including one photo I really like. It's a shot of a falconer with a kid listening, but it has a small light leak that ruins it--so goes life with film. I'm not sure how the light stain occurred. It looks like the kind of thing that could happen if you jiggle the film back on the camera. It's kind of weird because an identical stain appears in an adjacent frame in the same location. I could Photoshop it out, but for now I'll leave it as is.

Grandma's Pearls

This is my friend Jessica posing for me in my garage studio. I managed to fit in four sheets of 4x5, TMax 100 in between about 165 digital frames we shot that afternoon. We made some great digital images, but I think this is pretty sweet stuff.

This is actually a happy mistake. I was supposed to shoot this with only the available light from the garage-door windows, but forgot I still had the studio strobes plugged into the Cambo. So this is a 1/2 sec. exposure at f/5.6-8 with bunches of strobes piled on.

We're on a roll

OK. This is kind of breaking my unwritten promise of only displaying full-frame film images. But this one begged for cropping. I returned to Apache Junction on Saturday with the wife and kids so I could take advantage of the clouds moving in. I ended up trying to do some macro work with the 4x5. I think this is a brittlebush or what's left of it. I was trying to focus on that stalk in the foreground, but with the bellows racked out and the wind gusting just a bit, I sort of back-focused. But still fun.

Back after a long hiatus

So these pictures are nothing to write home about. I debated even posting them. But I felt it was important to note some things:
1 I finally got a chance just to drag out the view camera and do some shooting.
2 My buddy, Mike, and I got stuck in traffic and reached our destination just as the sun was setting. We really should have been to the location about an hour earlier.
3 The light changed so fast I really should not have even shot these images. But I really wanted to go through the motions of using the camera and getting a feel for it after a long layoff.
4 Good news is that Sarah is finally sleeping through the night and that means I can get up in the mornings to process film again. Yea!!!
5 These images suck as far as content, composition, lighting, etc. But I consider it a small victory just to pick up the camera, shoot and process 4x5 film.