Well, all roads would eventually lead here. I knew it in my gut. My dalliance with different film cameras and a desire for a certain quality took me past 35mm shooters with decent lenses, and I ended up in the world of 645 cameras: the Fuji Ga 645i, the Mamiya 645 and more recently the …
I first became interested in the Pentax 6×7 system when I saw one in a camera shop window in 1976. I thought that the camera looked like a giant 35mm SLR, and in a sense, that’s what it really is. I thought the design was very clever and intuitive. Other 6x7s that I had seen were box cameras; this one was different. I bought one in 1988, and ended up buying three more over the years. I’ve been using this system professionally since 2000.
The only filters I’ve ever used are UV or clear ones to protect my front elements on digital cameras (I know, I know). I was looking at ND filters one day to allow shooting with larger apertures in sunlight and stumbled across an article about circular polarisers. I liked how they remove reflections and add depth to cloudy skies, so I ordered a couple of cheapish Tiffens from Amazon that claim to block a stop and a half of light.
My wife and I went to Taiwan for 10 days in the run-up to Christmas 2019. It was our first time visiting this incredibly photogenic country, so I took a fairly ridiculous collection of films, my Leica M4-P, and my latest love – a Pentax 6×7 (the 2nd version with mirror lockup). I usually shoot B&W, largely because I can develop it at home, but for this beautiful country I felt I needed to go colour. This gave me a great opportunity to experiment with some unfamiliar stocks, perhaps the most exotic of which was CineStill 800T.
The Pentax 67 is out of character for 35mmc being big and hardly pocketable. My mirror lockup model was sourced from Jeremy at Japan Camera Hunter. Since obtaining the camera I’ve run about a dozen rolls of film through her. Female gendering for this massive hunk of metal? Why not?
