A year with the Fujica GW690

A bit over a year actually, but time flies when you're having fun. Some of my best photographs of the past year were taken with this camera. This is the most recent, a long exposure from just upstream of Elbow Falls. Film is Kodak Gold 200.

A couple things have come together to produce this particular blog. It started as I was browsing through images looking for something suitable for VERO #momo or Monochrome Monday. I found a few places where I hadn't done my Lightroom key-wording right, and as I was fixing that I found some images I'd lost track of. It was nice going back over them. And yes, I did select an image and put it up on VERO. (Look at the top of the blog roll for a link to my VERO photos.) This one, if you were wondering. It's one of the first images with this camera, taken on a road trip right after picking up the camera. Film is Acros II.

I've put about 45 rolls through the camera since late March 2022 and have thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. Keep in mind that I'm not an old school film photographer that converted to digital and then went back to film as a nostalgia trip. My only film experience was a point and shoot using the cheapest film that Black's sold. More recently I'd read about film photography and wanted to at least try it. A friend generously lent me a couple 35 mm Nikons, but they never felt happy in my hands and I struggled with the split ring prism.

Then I picked up the Fujica GW690 in a film photography store in Longview, Alberta. (Yes, this tiny little town is a mecca for film photography.) It felt right at home in my hands, and I hadn't known I was a rangefinder guy till I tried to focus it. For all that it's a huge camera mostly made of metal, it does not feel heavy or clunky. It feels solid and comfortable. There's 3 versions of it but I have the original. It first came onto the market about the time I was graduating high school.

I had to essentially learn the differences between film and digital photography. The camera doesn't use batteries at all; thus no auto functions and no light meter. It does exactly what it's told to do. I use my phone and have got pretty good at estimating the settings for the light and the image I want. Most film can cope with being a stop or two wrong, especially if you tend to over expose. Digital photography changed the way I look at the world, and film photography has changed it again.

But, I hear some readers saying. But why film? But isn't it expensive? But isn't it a drag waiting to finish the roll and then wait to get it developed? But don't you have to convert to digital anyway, so why bother with film?

Digital is all about the end product right now. Why not take the photo of some random scene? Take another, just in case. Goofed on the settings? Chimp your brains out. Keep taking more images till you get what you want. Edit and filter it to your heart's content. Let an AI product have a go at it to make it into the photo an algorithm decides to create. Drop it on Instagram and wallow in the likes. 

To some extent, comparing digital to film photography is comparing apples and oranges. Yes, they're both fruit, but there's a lot of differences. Lots of people have done image comparisons, but I don't have the technical expertise to do that in a meaningful way.

Film is more deliberate, especially with an older camera. I put more thought into the images, or potential images. I tend to edit them very lightly in Negative Lap Pro mainly because I'm not trying to make them look perfect or like digital. About the only thing I do in Lightroom is spot removal. 

I enjoy the process of manual film photography. Deciding which camera to take (I have 2 film cameras, and one digital that I could take for a walk.) Deciding which film, if there isn't film in the camera already. Thinking about where to go and what I might find there. Then looking at the various scenes and thinking if they would make a good film image, or how to work the composition to get a good image. Adjust the settings and focus, 2x everything, relax, and click. Or rather, ping! The GW690 makes a mechanical ping sound, which is not the leaf shutter. I'm told it's the mechanism on the bottom of the camera  that counts the number of rolls, but I'm not sure why or how accurate it is. 

Then I drop the film at the lab, and typically a couple days later I can pick up the big beautiful negatives. If I've done everything right the images amaze me. I've goofed a few times on various aspects, which is to be expected and it's a learning experience. When I say big negatives, I'm not kidding. They are 6 cm high x 9 cm wide. This is about 5 times the area of a 35mm negative, and commensurately more detail. How much detail, you ask?

Look at these two images. My favourite model Michelle and her husband, as I was showing off the new to me camera. The film is Acros II on an overcast day. This digital image was captured from the negative using a Canon EF 100 mm f2.8 L macro lens, and lightly edited in Negative Lab Pro.

This is not a digital zoom of the above image, it's photographed again using a Canon MP-E 65mm macro at about 1:1. This image is about 15 or 16 mm wide out of the original negative, and was edited slightly differently.

 

That tells me if I do everything right, and have a subject worth it, I could print an image about 10 feet across, detailed enough to count individual hairs. I'm not likely to need any more resolution than that.

Part of the process is conversation. The only people that talk to me when I'm using a digital camera are the people at the event that know me, and it's seldom about the camera. When I'm around other people with the big film camera, lots of people ask, and a surprising number are familiar with it, or know of it. I've had some lovely conversations with other photographers that started with the camera. Like this one. The guy on the left used to shoot film, and was thinking about it again. I never would have asked to take their photo if I hadn't been carrying the film camera. We had a nice chat as we strolled the beach. Film is Kodak Gold 200.

One of my best photos from last year with this camera was during a Yukon trip in September. I took along Kodak Gold 200, and was stunned at the colour. This photo is handheld. You can see other photos from the Yukon trip here, including this one.

As for the expense, the camera itself is much, MUCH cheaper than a digital camera and lens system. I can't find the paperwork, but I think I paid $650, and a version 3 of it is available for $1100. After buying it, my only expense is buying film and paying to have it developed. Most 120 film is about $10 to $15 a roll, some a little bit cheaper, some lots more expensive. Developing costs just over $10 a roll, so I tell people my cost is about $25 per roll, for 8 photos per roll. Eek! Some say $3 a photo, when digital is free? Are you out of your mind? 

Keep in mind that digital isn't free. You had to buy the camera, the lens(es), SD cards, a computer and probably an external hard drive, and a program like Lightroom or Photoshop. Without even trying that could be a $5K up front cost, and could easily be $10K. 

I can expose a lot of film for that much money. But really, lets say I expose a roll a week, that comes to $1300. No hobby is free. There are people that drop that much at Starbucks every year. Plus when I see a sale on film I can stock up. 

Is this the perfect camera? Of course not. It's not even the perfect film camera. It can't focus closer than about a meter so macro photos are right out. Most of them have the T shutter speed, rather than a B, so there's a trick to long exposures, and exposure times between 1 second and 5 seconds or so are kind of tough. The lens is a fixed 90mm. To say it's not unobtrusive is a huge understatement, so it's not the camera for stealthy street photography. The ping, or rather PING sound of taking a photo is off putting for some people. Some people are not fans of range finder cameras. Some want (need!) a light meter.  Whatever.

But it's become my favourite camera. I don't take as many photos with it but it's fun carrying it around as I look for, or create photos. I think about projects I can use it for. Here are some photos of it with my DSLR for a size comparison. Looking forward to making lots more photos with it!

So that didn't work 2x, and a Lomo 100 review

Part of the fun of film is not knowing what you'll actually get once it's developed. You can plan, do exposure calculations, double check focus and lens cap removal, and still be surprised. This image, for example.

I was out for a walk with some buddies in the Forest Lawn neighbourhood, informally known in Calgary as The Hood. With that clue, some of my readers know exactly where I was for that photo. Then again, if you squint you can probably read the street sign.

Those of you that have followed along know I've been doing some long exposure work on film, mostly with running water so far. I'd been thinking about traffic, wondering how that would turn out. Yes, light trails at night are fun, but I was thinking of daytime.

The Co-op store and gas station was an ok background, but what I was really after was the blurs from passing traffic. So two points. I'd carefully double-checked the exposure with a 10 stop ND filter and with Kokak Gold 200 loaded (It was what was in the camera for a previous session that didn't happen.) I came up with a 13 second exposure. That much worked out just fine. 

Here's where the guesswork came in. I had no idea if the vehicles would be in the frame long enough to captured or not. Pretty much not. The one above is the best of the bunch, and you'd have to be pretty keen-eyed to find the transit bus in there. Look for the faint horizontal white streaks across the middle of the frame. It was just sitting there, off to the left of the frame for several seconds after I opened the shutter. I had hoped to see that as a faint but recognizable image, then the ghost trail heading right and fading out as the bus accelerated.

Here's where I goofed. I took all 8 images at the same exposure time, plus or minus a second or so, varying the traffic conditions. What I should have done is open the shutter a stop for each new exposure and shortened the exposure time accordingly. I started at f32 and 13 seconds, should then have done f22 and 7, f16 and 4, f11 and 2, then f8 and 1 second or so. With the GW690 those last two would start getting tricky as the camera has a T mode, not a B mode for long exposures.

At some point, I think I'd get the results I'm looking for. Of course, as the shutter time gets short, it also becomes more tricky to time the traffic. Once I know which exposures work, then it's time to find the right composition, where the background is actually interesting.

In one of the eight exposures a man is walking through the intersection while the shutter is open. He'd held back a bit to stay out of my photo, but I told him to do his thing, that I was hoping to see him as a faint blur. Can't see him at all.

That was the first thing that didn't work. I found out the other thing that didn't work shortly after the long exposures. I'd also taken the Canon 7 along, loaded with Flic Film Elektra 100. I was happily finding window reflection photos, knowing I was near the end of the roll. Then I looked at the camera, thinking I had to be at the end of the roll. It said 39. I know sometimes you can get 37 and maybe 38 out of a roll of 36, but 39 was a surprise. I figured maybe because it was an off brand it had been cut a few inches longer.

I did 40 and was sure there was a problem. Most likely I hadn't loaded it correctly and I hadn't made any exposures at all. Or that the film wasn't anchored properly in the canister as a manufacturing defect, and it had come out to be spooled onto the take up side. 

I started to rewind, and within a couple turns I got that subtle click that told me the film had been rewound into the canister. Oops. I ended up going to London Drugs and asked nice if the tech could pull it back out for me. There is a special tool for this. It only took him seconds. In the mean time I've got some Acros II loaded, so when it's done I'll reload the Elektra and try again. 

The Lomography 100 you ask? This is a cheaper film brand that I associate with variable colour chemistry, and with cheap plastic cameras. Still, I picked up a 3 pack of 120 for a good price and figured I'd try it. 

There is an alley near the above Co-op that has been painted as part of a beautification process. I'm dumbfounded there is no graffiti. We strolled and I thought I'd see how the paint turned out in the bright sunlight. I'd forgot that the GW690 gives me a pentagram flare when aiming into the sun, and that spoiled a couple of photos. Here's the best of the rest.

I didn't have to tweak the exposure in Negative Lab Pro or Lightroom. There were minor adjustments, and some dust removal. I'm pleased at how the colours are rendered. This film seems to do really well in bright sunlight. I have a few exposures taken in Fish Creek to see how some natural colours show up. There's 3 left on the roll as I write this. Maybe I'll have another go at some long exposures. I'd buy more of this.

My photo walk buddies, both checking the back of their cameras. They both occasionally carry film cameras, but were doing digital that day. I went just with film.

Water like honey or silk

You might remember I'd tried some film long exposure photos a couple weeks ago, here. One of the common long exposure photo effects is to turn running water into milk. That's mostly not something I'm interested in. My tastes run more toward a fog flowing over rocks effect, or getting interesting reflections or textures in the water. 

That's the result here. I was actually doing two experiments at once. One was simply the long exposure film experiment of water flowing over rocks in Fish Creek. The other was trying a phone app called Viewfinder. It turns your phone camera into a combination view finder and light meter, but it's better than that. It also calculates the exposure times for whatever ND filter you put on your camera, up to 10 stops, and lets you take notes, and keeps the meta data! It was only 4 or 5 dollars, and I figured it would be worth a try.

I'm quite pleased with the app. It took a bit of back and forth to set it up for my GW690 and figure out some of the subtleties of the light meter. I'm still not convinced I've got it totally nailed down, but it mostly agreed with the light meter I've been using, and the resulting calculations required. I only had to make the slightest exposure corrections in NegativeLapPro and Lightroom, which could be called personal taste rather than getting a perfect exposure, so it's close enough. I'll have to get out and do more long exposure photography, of course!

Part of the trick of capturing water flowing over rocks at this time of year is finding liquid water. A couple spots I had in mind were still frozen over, so I'll have to remember to visit them later in the year.

Here's the the photos that worked best from this roll.

1. I was a bit worried when metering that the tops of the rocks would be over exposed, and the water would be solid black. All these exposures were about 2 minutes.

2. The best of the bunch from a composition, and flowing effect, I think. I had to use a gradient filter to bring down the brightness on the right side a bit, and sure enough, some of the detail came back.

3. This one was fun. I've got two slightly different versions, trying to balance the light on the snow, and the dark water. The flowing water effect doesn't show up as well as I had hoped, but the reflections are nice.

4. I'm showing off a bit here. This had no real need to be a long exposure photo. The water is fairly calm in that pool, but what this does is clarify the reflections a bit. They came out better than I had hoped. This was a tricky scene to meter with all that bright snow on the left, and shadows on the right.

5. One photo left on the roll, and not wanting to walk too far. I saw the little log in the middle of the scene and as I was thinking about the water ripples, that little cross-wise stick arrived. I watched it balance, slowly moving back and forth. Quickly set up and click, wondering how the slow motion would be captured and if any of the foamy bubbles floating downstream would be captured as streaks. No and no. But the water texture here! Love it! Now if only I could figure out what was causing that highlight pentagram in the top centre. I've seen it before in some photos, and it might simply be a function of that lens pointed into the sun or bright light. 

Learnings, B&W film, long exposure

 I'd done some long exposure photography on digital recently, here and here, and had lots of fun doing it. The intent had always been to try it on film, and I'm finally getting around to it. 

Even doing this digitally has its challenges. In most digital cameras the light meter looks through the lens, and if you've screwed on an ND filter, what it's seeing is pretty dark. Running the shutter speed down to the 30 second maximum might not show you anything on the back of the camera. It might be impossible for the camera to achieve focus, meaning either focus manually, or set the focus before screwing on the ND filter and hope nothing moves. The usual route is to guess at the camera settings and try it. Look at the results, tweak as necessary to achieve your artistic vision for the scene. This might take a while but it's good practice. Just make sure you know which way the tide is going.

Film is more difficult because the try till you get it right approach isn't going to work. One solution is to figure it out with a digital camera first, then translate the results to the film camera. Except, just because you're using ISO 100 film, for example, doesn't mean setting your digital camera to ISO 100 gets the same sensitivity result. An f stop setting on the digital camera might not mean the same thing as the f stop on a different lens on a film camera, and almost certainly won't if it's a medium format film camera.

Except I found a formula. Shutter speed times 2 to the ND filter number power. There. All clear? Good to go? Maybe not.

So, assuming I'm using my GW690, which has no light meter. I use my trusty phone app to discover that for a scene, the settings are 1/125 second at f16, which is not a surprising setting for a normal exposure of a subject on a sunny day. To do a long exposure of that scene I screw on an ND1000 filter, which is a 10 stop filter. Don't ask me why it's called 1000.  A whole lot less light gets through the filter to the film, unless I leave the shutter open longer. How much longer? 1/125 times 2 to the 10th, which is 8.2 seconds. The point 2 doesn't matter. I'd probably do 9 seconds, maybe 10, because film tends to deal with over exposure better than under exposure.

Now let's pretend that after experimenting with the digital camera, you know you aren't getting the effect you want, and you need 16 to 20 seconds of exposure. That's fine. Change to f22 to halve the amount of light coming into the lens, and leave the shutter open twice as long, 16 seconds in this case.

Except, in another film complication, there's a thing called reciprocity failure. For most normal exposure settings on a camera, the shutter speed and aperture f stop are related, in terms of how much light goes through the lens. A small opening for a longer time, can be the same as a bigger opening for a shorter time. (Yes, for the pedants out there I'm ignoring depth of field issues.) Double one, half the other, and it's the same amount of light, for most practical purposes. Except for film, when the light starts getting dim. 

Film needs a certain amount of light for the chemical reaction in the film to work. This varies with different film stocks, but after a second or so of exposure, (which would typically mean a night time exposure, or an ND filter exposure, or some funky intentional camera movement photo) this needs to be taken into account. Going from a 2 second to a 4 second exposure might not be twice the amount of light, you might need 6 seconds to give the film enough light to react.

In case you missed it, long exposure photography works best if there's something that moves, typically water or clouds, and something that's fixed, like a pier or a building. I wanted to get out and try it, and had a spot in mind. The only hitch in the plans was that it was clear blue sky. I got involved in something else for a while, and headed out when it started to cloud over. I was thinking some cloud motion with a blue sky background would be good. 

Except I left it too long. By the time I got there, got set up, tested the exposure and composition with the digital camera, it had pretty well clouded over and was getting windy and cold. I was glad I wore the parka. At this point I didn't know the formula, and used the digital settings plus a bit of by guess and by golly, knowing I could do some compensation during the digitization process. The film is Acros II ISO 100, which doesn't especially have a reciprocity failure issue, which does simplify things.

As a minor technical note, there's two ways of the shutter staying open. One is Bulb mode, where it stays open as long as you hold the button down, which had better mean you're using a cable release or else you're moving the camera and destroying your image. The other is T mode, meaning push the button and it stays open till you change the shutter speed. Which is what my GW690 has. The trick is to cover the lens with a hat, then reach under it to change the shutter. AND THEN DON'T FORGET TO CHANGE IT BACK FOR THE NEXT EXPOSURE. Learned that one the hard way.

1. Here's what the scene looks like with a normal exposure. This is the Bow River near the Ivor Strong bridge. Not going to win any awards with this, but that's not the point.

2. This is actually a minute long exposure at f22. I wanted to smooth the water out as much as possible. See how much better the reflections show up in the water? It would be a much more interesting photo if the clouds had cooperated.

3. Under the bridge was much darker, and with some math in my head figured I needed 4 times as much light, so went for a 4 minute exposure. Neither of these images needed exposure tweaking in NLP or Lightroom so I guessed about right.

4. Then over to Mallard Point to finish the roll. By now it was getting colder and darker, so I hand held the digital for 30 seconds just to see what the light would be like, and figured the film would need 90 seconds. This looks a bit dark, and yet there's no detail in the snow. Maybe if I wanted to be really fancy I could mask it in Lightroom and play with it a bit, but the odds of anything good coming of it are small. Notice you can't see the birds that flew through the scene.

5. Just to amuse you, here's the digital colour version, 30 seconds at ISO 200.

I'm thinking about other places to try long exposures on film. 

V Island beaches on Gold 200

We wanted to go somewhere warmer than Calgary and get away from winter for a bit. Much as we love New Zealand and want to go back, there was still enough uncertainty about travel that we didn't want to ante up that much money. Having a thousand dollars held by West Jet because a flight was cancelled isn't so bad. We know we can use that. Having something on the order of $10K to $15K held by an airline that might not be flying to Canada again is a different proposition entirely.

Vancouver Island is about the warmest winter place in Canada. We hadn't been to Sooke, and decided to stay in an Airbnb to explore the coast up to Port Renfrew. The house was huge and perfect for us. The flight experience was about as good as it gets, and no problem with the camera film. The car rental company upgraded us. We managed to sneak in a lunch with one of Linda's buddies she'd worked with for a long time. 

Most of you probably know it's kind of rainy in BC year round. We were prepared for that, with temperatures typically in the 'wear a sweater under the rain jacket' range. Seeing lots of liquid water is a treat, even if it complicates carrying a film camera.

I took the digital with 3 of my most used lenses, plus the GW690 with a bunch of Kodak Gold 200 and a couple rolls of Acros II 100. I took along a laptop, but hadn't intended to edit photos during the trip. It makes for a heavy carry on. The problem with my film cameras is that they are not water resistant. There's no battery or electronics to short out, but there's lots of delicate mechanical mechanisms that probably wouldn't like salty water at all. 

So the film camera lived in the bag most of the time. As did the other two lenses, and some other stuff. It slows down the beach walking even more than the coarse pebble beaches. Some of the places for the best digital photos (the long exposure, the Potholes, the water fall, the beach rocks) I either didn't think of the film camera, or didn't want to risk it getting wet. Plus there's the whole having to put the bag down somewhere mostly dry, open it up, dig out the other camera, put the digital somewhere, get the photo(s) and then put it all back again. For the long exposure, it was me and the camera bag on a big rock, surrounded by water. To say I was careful about putting on the ND filter and all the other changes is an understatement, and even with the care I still got my feet wet. I would have liked to try the long exposure on film after doing digital to get the settings, but the tide was coming in fast. Typically it was too damp to be carrying the film camera on a strap. I even put the digital in a plastic bag for part of one walk.

There are, of course, some photos that are almost duplicates between film and digital. I'm not deliberately creating images for the purposes of comparing film to digital. That ship has sailed, as one of my managers liked to say. It might happen because I've used the digital as a sophisticated light meter, or I get the digital, and decide I want a film version as well. The portrait photo below is one of those. The photographer in the photo was amused that anyone was still doing film. 

If you've been following along, you know I took that camera and that film to Yukon last September. I nearly swooned when I saw the photos. That film was PERFECT for Yukon colours. Not so much for BC beach driftwood. I think many of them came out a bit more orange than I liked, and playing with the settings didn't seem to do much good. Even though I typically expose for the shadows, and let the highlights take care of themselves, I'm thinking I underexposed several of these, leading them to be a bit more orangey red than real life.

1. Like this one. Playing with the settings in Negative Lab Pro got weird very quickly.

2.

3. The colour here is mostly good, but Linda's purple outfit is considerably more vibrant. I was trying to expose for her face, but I don't think the light meter is that precise.

4.

5.

6.

7. I was fascinated by how the wind has shaped that tree.

8.

9. The promised portrait. I asked these nice people if I could capture them, and did film and digital. This image is cropped in a bit, and I should have got a bit closer. There are subtle differences between the digital and film versions.  I should have moved the square of whatever it is out of the left side of the image. Live and learn.

10. The GW690 has a fixed 90mm lens, about the same as a 40mm on a 35mm camera. The zooming happens with your feet. The ocean is right behind me, and I do mean right behind me. A big wave came in and I had wet feet again. Good thing the Airbnb had a hair dryer. I was chatting with another photographer and showed him the digital versions. He's been back several times to get that photo because often there isn't a place to stand at all, with the waterfall going straight into the ocean for most of the tidal cycle.

11. Part of the Sooke Potholes gorge, giving just a hint of the fabulous light I had. This is cropped in quite a bit to get rid of some lens flare and a stupid branch in the upper left of the image.

12.

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14. This is part of the Galloping Goose trail built on an old railway line. This is distinctly more orangey red than in real life.

15. What you can see of the bridge deck is considerably closer to the real colour. 

16

Overall I'm glad I took the camera. I quite like some of the images, even if they don't quite overwhelm me like the Yukon ones did. I'm wishing I'd taken it out for some of the forest photos to see how it dealt with dim light and all the deep rich fabulous greens and browns. But then, those digital photos were at ISO 1600, f2.8 and 1/100 of a second, and were still a bit dim. If I've done the math right I'd be down about 1/8 or 1/4 second and I wasn't carrying a tripod.

I'm coming to realize that I need to decide if a photo ramble is to expose film, or digital. It's hard for me to do both. If I was going to be doing those beach rambles with just a film camera, I might still be there.

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