This time, Ektar colour

This blog is going to be written over several days. If you've been following along you know I purchased a Fujica GW690 film camera from The Film Experience in Longview. Partway through the first roll it appeared to lock up, and it turned out a spring had broken. Considering it's probably more than 40 years old, I'm not terribly surprised. That was replaced and in the mean time I shot several rolls in a loaner GL690, which is a very similar camera. 

There's some photos of my GW here, before the repair, which includes my Canon 6D Mkii for size comparison. On the way home from the first ramble with the repaired GW, I stopped to have a friend take some photos of me with the camera. They'd been curious about it, and this was their first chance to see it in person. There's a yellow filter on it because I was shooting B&W. Thanks Ken!

When you say the film negative is 6x9 cm people say, yeah ok, whatever. But then show them this and they are all holy doodle!

This counter is times 10, not the number of rolls or individual photos.

If there's a way of using the serial number to get the actual manufacture date, Mrs Google hasn't been able to find it so far. As should be clear from the photos, this is a used camera. There are wear marks and scratches, but it doesn't look like it's been abused. Hopefully it's previous owner or owners treated it well. I almost prefer it like this, rather than new out of the box from some hitherto unknown storage container. It has more personality this way.

So now I'll go back to a mostly chronological order for the photos. This is the new Inglewood bridge during a photo walk with some buddies. Portra 160 on the GL690. I call this sort of shot 'there I was and this is what I saw.' What I really wanted to do was find the spot in the middle of the river where the two bridges would frame one another. As you can see, trying that would be a bad idea.

The day before I picked up the repaired GW690 I took a walk along 17Ave SW after dropping off tax documents to my accountant. I had Ektar 100 loaded, and was looking for colour on a bright sunny day. I chatted with a couple people along the way about the camera. That doesn't happen much carrying around a regular Canon digital camera.

With one exception these are quite lightly edited. The dust and hair behaved itself so there were only a few corrections there. My trouble this time seemed to be getting the negative in the carrier lined up with the camera frame. Plus a bit of getting the camera itself level while shooting, which explains some of the irregular cropping. I have one of those little 3 way bubble levels that fit in the shoe, maybe I should put that on the camera for rambles.

I love how the colours popped here! It's almost brighter than I remember seeing. Pity there was a car parked where I needed to stand to square up the composition.

A little over exposed, so I tweaked it a bit to tone it down, but it still looks washed out.

Two views of a mural that I quite liked. The one with the building reflection was actually taken first, then I took up a space in the parking lot to get the second shot, which I like better. It's a good thing the guy trying to park wasn't really hungry. I think I dropped the shutter speed a stop here or the light bounced off the building a bit differently. I don't know the name of the artist that did the mural.

Even lighter shades show up nicely. I had taken a quick shot of a school bus to see how the bright yellow turned up on film. I was quite pleased with it, a very realistic yellow. Pity I slightly blew the focus. It reminds me once again that focus is quite sensitive on this.

I'm finding portrait shots tricky, particularly looking up. I should have been stopped down a bit more on this, which might have got the trees in focus. I was working on the balconies about half way up for focus, and I can see now that's incorrect. Not sure what's happening with the blue fringe at the top of the clouds. That looks a bit odd, but isn't anything I did. I think.

Me and a buddy did a bit of a road trip yesterday (as I write this) to pick up the camera and explore some back roads near Longview. The day was a complete success. I took some Acros II 100 along the way, and then explored South Glenmore park. The idea was to work on calibrating my eyeballs for exposure, and see how a treed area comes out in B&W. Stay tuned!