I’m more of an SLR guy, but it was inevitable that I too would have to get a taste of the rangefinder world. For me, it started with a “Revue 400 SE”. Revue is like a private label of the german mail order company “Quelle”. It has the same features as the Minolta Hi-Matic 7sII or the Konica Auto S3. I would even say that they are pretty much the same, but I don’t want to start a debate…
To add another dimension to my visit to the ‘Air’ exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, I decided to take my camera along. The gallery environment provided plenty of interesting shapes, light and dark environments, colour, contrast, reflections, and the artwork itself. These images feature the hanging spheres from artist Tomás Saraceno, Dora Budor’s volcano-littered scenes inside brightly lit glass cases, Yhonnie Scarce’s Cloud Chamber, Ron Mueck’s remarkable “In bed” sculpture, and Carlos Amorales’ thousands of butterflies and moths, cut from black paper and fixed to the gallery walls. Also on display at the exhibition, and of particular interest for photographers, are Rachel Mounsey’s evocative images of the Black Summer fires in 2019.
I bought a 35mm roll of Yeti on the advice of a friend on Flickr but never had a clear idea of how I would use a film rated at ISO 6. I knew it wouldn’t be shot on the fly, of course, because I’d need to carry a tripod and take notes. So my single roll spent a couple months sitting on my desk.
Yeti is a blue-sensitive B&W film, which means it can only “see” the blue part of the spectrum. It is similar to orthochromatic film in that it is only sensitive to part of the visible spectrum, except in this case, the sensitivity is limited to the blue part. Yeti is available from the Film Photography Project and is described on the website as an estar-based, positive motion picture film intended for direct contact copying titles and mats in motion picture work.
I was born in January in a small town which back then was still communist Poland. The transition to market economy began a year and a half later. It brought a new opening albeit at a high price: the country was shaken, and many people were left to their own devices, unable to cope with the realities of dashing capitalism.
Although my childhood was happy, I recently realised how much I felt the consequences of this change. Contrary to my peers in the West and in large Polish cities, I did not experience material wealth.
This last November my partner and I took a trip from Cardiff to Nottingham for a Weezer tribute show at The Bodega. I usually shoot on a Contax 139Q but it was away for a service, so took my Yashica FX-D, which I got on eBay in a bit of a state. The FX-D was perfect as it’s pretty much the same camera as the 139Q underneath, has all the features you could ever need, and works with my Contax Zeiss lenses.
