absent.canadian

… so I spent a glorious morning at Umstead Park, enjoying the 20+ degree Celsius (70+ degree Fahrenheit) temperatures.  The sky was a brilliant blue, wildlife was in its full springtime splendor, and life simply felt right.

I took all sorts of fabulous shots with my new (old) camera, and am now remembering why digital photography is cool.  See, if I was shooting digital I’d already have a bunch of fabulous shots posted for you to “ooooooh” and “aaaaaaah” over.

But I don’t.  There’s a few rolls of unprocessed Ektachrome sitting on my counter.  Today is Saturday.  The film processing place doesn’t open until Monday, which means I’ll have the developed negatives in my hand by Tuesday at the earliest.  Scans will take at least another day.  And by that point, the weather will probably have turned crappy, the moment will have passed and this blog post will already be in the archives.

Oh, film, you’re such a wonderful thing.  And so frustrating.  :-)

So for now, I leave you with the thought that it was a glorious day.  Many great photos were taken.  And you’ll have to wait what seems like a ridiculously long time to see any of them.

I clearly don’t learn.

Late in 2005 I sold all of my film cameras (with a few collectable exceptions) and replaced them with a Fuji E900 digital camera.  A sprinkling of money and wave of my magic wand turned that into a Nikon D80, which has been my camera du jour, save my recent acquisition of a little Lumix point-and-shoot.

Early last week, I took the plunge and put a fairly aggressive bid on a Mamiya RB67 listed on eBay … and won it for $160.  That’s a pittance for a camera that sells for well over $1500 in its current production iteration.

The camera arrived last Thursday, and I was quickly reminded of one reason I got out of film photography.  My first trip to buy film set me back $50 – roughly the cost of a 16 GB SDHC card that would hold at least 1400 RAW images in my D80.  $50 will instead buy me 70 shots worth of film.

Plus the cost of processing.

And here’s all the wonderful things about shooting with an RB67:

• It weighs 6.2 pounds (2.8 kg for the rest of the world).  That’s sort of like having a set of stocks locked around your neck.
• It takes as much space in my camera bag as my former Nikon F2 with motor drive, 15mm rectilinear lens, 105mm 2.5 lens, 50mm 1.4 lens, and Metz 45 flash.  (translation: the RB67 body and lens alone fill my shoulder bag completely)
• Taking a shot entails these steps: open the hood.  Remove the lens cap.  Remove the dark slide.  Rotate the back to portrait or landscape (as desired).  Unlock the shutter release.  Make sure the shutter is cocked.  Pick your aperture and shutter speed.  Compose the shot.  Take the shot.  Advance the film.  Cock the shutter.  And if you’re not going to do any more shooting: replace the dark slide.  Replace the lens cap.  Fold down the hood.  Lock the shutter release.  Translation: this isn’t point-and-shoot photography.
• The tripod tap at the bottom is 3/8″ – not the usual 1/4″ that most cameras have.  There’s good reason to have the 3/8″ thread, but it also means I have to chase down that particular Manfrotto quick release plate.
• Did I mention that it weighs 6.2 pounds (2.8 kg)?
• You get 10 shots on a roll of 120 film.  At $6 for a roll of Ektachrome 100VS, that works out to about $1.20 per shot (with processing).
• There’s no built-in light meter (although there was a metered prism sold that is somewhat rare now).  This is actually a good thing, but it adds an additional step if you haven’t already taken an accurate meter reading for whatever you’re shooting.

But I love it.  I took it over to Duke University yesterday and cranked off two rolls of film.  It took me a bit to get used to the “unfurling-a-freight-train” feel of it every time I wanted to take a shot, but there’s also nothing that compares to the very mechanical, and very positive feeling “thunk” that comes with every shot – knowing that a finely engineered mess of springs, levers, mirrors and metal plates exposed a piece of panchromatic film as accurately as mechanical engineering can.

And that, my friends, is something that no amount of megapixels will ever replace.