Portola Redwoods State Park lies on the west side of the Santa Cruz mountains, where the land slopes down towards the Pacific, and the cool sea breezes create the ideal climate for California Redwoods. A creek runs through it; easily fordable in a dry summer, and waist high in a wet winter. I have been fortunate enough to go on many walks along its network of trails, taking a camera with me.
After recently acquiring my Pentax 6×7, I already had a pre-planned road trip in place so it was inevitable that I’d take it along with me to give it a full on road test. I had 4 days in total to shoot, and here’s how it all went.
Firstly, in relation to my other medium format camera, my Hasselblad 500CM, the Pentax 6×7 is a massive beast and boy does it weight something. 2.6kilos in fact. If I’m honest, the weight never really posed an issue for me – but shooting all day with it might be a little more challenging I guess.
Katie Melua’s latest album, Album No.8, came out on October 16th. It’s the Georgian-British singer-songwriter’s eighth studio album (hence the name), and also her eighth consecutive UK top 10 album. I knew her music from hits like Nine Million Bicycles and The Closest Thing to Crazy (which came out when I was in high school), but Album No.8 is the first where she wrote all the lyrics, drawing on influences as diverse as Virginia Woolf and The Grateful Dead.
So I bought a Pentax 6×7 in May 2018. That was the year I felt it was time to be more serious with my photography and that meant a serious medium format set-up. Abandoning digital cameras, I returned to film five years ago and dabbled a little with 120 stuff through vintage viewfinders and TLRs. But nothing serious or expensive. Now was time for that upgrade.
