South West of Dallas is the Cedar Ridge Preserve, a very large nature park with several great wooded trails, streams, overlooks, and a lake. I have a vision to spend more time doing scenic shots this winter when the street shooting is pretty much non existent, so I went down to shoot over the weekend. I brought my Mamiya m645 and the Bessa R with Ektar 100 in the 645 with some Arista 400 in backup, and some orthochromatic film I picked up at a swapmeet (I should probably write another blog post about that).
I normally dislike photographing in wooded areas. I find that because they're so well shaded, the scenes are often very low dynamic range and I find it hard to compose interesting shots. Sadly, this outing was no exception. I really had high hopes for the scenic lookouts, which did yield a bit of interest but because the day turned out to be mostly overcast, there was a lack of punch I was really hoping for.
The first few frames on the m645 were lackluster as expected, but I remembered I probably was just not looking close enough... I needed to see the things that are otherwise overlooked. This branch may have been one of these things. I liked how this turned out but I'm not sure it really captures the Ektar look.
And that was the only color shot I really liked... Why? Well surprisingly its not because its the best one I took, its because the other one I took, that I knew would be great, didn't make it on the film because the camera had a winding problem. I have not detailed all the issues I've had with the m645 since I got the first body on Facebook but lets just say its one thing after another. I'm now on my 3rd. Body. The winding issue continued on the next roll of Arista 400 but I kind of saw it coming so I was able to get a few more shots but still had some lost to the fault.
This is actually captured on the Bessa with the ortho film (pushed to 400 iso). This would have been spectacular in color. I love it here in b/w but man! what a miss. I knew something felt funny at this point but I was not aware of the issue until I was at the lake a few steps later and noticed the winding sounded like it was all spooled up in the take up spool. I "took" a few frames at the lake then opened the back only to find it all wound up and the frame counter still on 11. I loaded the Arista in and got back to it, pretty dejected.
I've been able to run a few test rolls through the camera since this shoot and it
seems to be working fine now but I'll report again on the next real shoot.
Comments
Post a Comment