The mysterious ways.

Photo above: Ilford FP4+ at EI 200, Ilfosol 3 1+14 (c) Leo Nikishin

It all started with a suprisingly good Olympus film point-and-shoot that I really liked and broke.

It continued with Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z2 that I liked even more and dipped my toes in digital photography with (including the first peek into the world of Photoshop).

Then along came Pentax K200D, my first DSLR (that I also really liked). Different lenses, a flashgun, weather-sealed body, RAW files and whatnot – I was fascinated. And moved to the UK.

Then I met a girl that had an entire wall covered in small photolab prints from her old film camera. It was like looking into a parallel universe. A few months later, I was hooked and could not get the idea of getting a film camera out of my head.

In 2009, I got my first film SLR, good old Minolta XG-M with 50/1.7 Rokkor-X. The camera itself was fine but it was really that lens, a fast 50mm, that changed the way I saw and photographed. Bokeh, sharpness, contrast, colour – I loved that lens. Oh and Portra 160VC, loved that one too.

Couple of years later, I was bent on going even deeper into film and finally got myself Bronica ETRC with 75mm and 150mm lenses: medium format! Oh my God this thing is huge, especially the lenses. Soon after that, I started developing black-and-white film. At the time, I was really into landscape photography and dreamed of becoming a new Ansel Adams (read the books, did check plane tickets to California, settled on a Snowdonia National Park instead). Later, I finally came to the point of doing both developing and printing myself – and quickly realized that it was not a sustainable use model for me. The camera was too heavy to lug around, I was doing a couple of gap years between my university degrees, so saving money became a priority, the printing caused too much fuss as I moved back in with my parents, it had to stop.

And so it did with me buying my first phone that had a usable camera (usable, not good or anything like that), Nokia 710. In the meantime, I thought many times about selling the Bronica but something always stopped me, be it a lack of buyer interest, nostalgia, laziness or a combination of those things. The only time I used the Bronica was during a summer vacation with my parents in Czech Republic. As I then moved to the Netherlands to continue my music studies, it took a very long time for my parents to finally get those rolls developed and scanned but those photos nevertheless became just about the best portraits of my parents that I had ever taken.

In 2017, I decided to buy a used DSLR with decent video to record live performances of my string quartet. After much research and ad browsing, I settled on a Sony a37. Great little camera, very decent IQ and pretty good video, too. Before I knew it, I was back in love with photography and photographing! As time passed, my lens collection grew substantially and I finally got myself into the beautiful labyrinth that is off-camera lighting. Also, this was the camera that accompanied my transition from mostly landscapes to portraiture. I had always been a rather shy person and pointing a camera at someone had never come easy to me before but I slowly started to feel differently about it and that really signalled a big change in who I am as a photographer. At some point, people started to approach me and ask to do their photoshoots. Eventually, they even offered me money to do so. Yay.

A year later, I thought of making myself a Christmas present and bought an obnoxiously cheap used Sony a850. Fool’s dream has finally come true: full frame! Boxy, monstrous and heavy, a850 is a fantastic studio camera: it will deliver beautifully, as long as you give it all the light it needs. Otherwise, the noise is everywhere, at any ISO. The viewfinder is huge, the autofocus is precise (although not crazy fast), resolution is great and colours are fantastic. I realized that my lens line up would have to be thoroughly revised and it would require quite a bit of an investment, so the plan was to sell the entire Bronica set to finance the shift to full frame. Problem was, I did not shoot Bronica for quite some time and I remembered it having a light leak at some point. Not wanting to sell a camera with defects to an unsuspecting buyer, I got a roll of Delta 400 to check it out.

Before I had a chance to shoot that roll, two things crossed my mind:

1. Since it has a PC sync port, Bronica is actually fully compatible with my wireless manual flash system (the Yongnuo one). Got the cable, hooked it up to 560-TX controller and voila! – flash sync at 1/500sec, quite a step up from a850’s 1/200. The knowledge that medium format cameras used to be workhorses of studio photographers for decades has waken up inside my head.

2. Reading articles about scanning film with DSLR made me think that I could, in a pinch, organize developing film myself and then scan instead of printing. Sure, the film itself is still costly but not prohibitively so if I do all the processing and scanning myself.

When another photoshoot came about, I decided to give it a go and shoot the last part of the session on Bronica. I figured out the exposure with a850 and flash meter, connected to PC port and did the best I could. A couple of days later, I got negatives and scans from the local lab and… had to throw all of my gear plans away.

Delta 400 (c) Leo Nikishin

Medium format film (even in scanned, digitalized form) looks so different. Different perception of space, different tone transitions, different visual language. I am not into holy wars of any kind, so I am not saying it is better but it is definitely very, very different from anything out of digital. In my previous post, I talked about how film cameras make people that you photograph feel very differently and it definitely played a role here, too. Oh and I loved shooting film again! I loved the adventure of it, the bravery, the dedication. I loved the concentration and conviction that it brought to the table. Generic lab scans are no indication of technical quality, one needs an Imacon of even a drum scanner to properly test that, but even these meh quality scans were enough to persuade me. And what’s much more important to me, the model herself was blown away by film photos and really loved them.

Now, I am back to developing black-and-white film (C41 process is also coming soon!) and shooting with Bronica as my main camera. Sony a37 and a whole bunch of A-mount lenses have found new homes. The a850 stays, as do a few lenses. Talk about them mysterious ways…

Do you shoot film? Do you shoot both film and digital? How do you balance the two? Do you work film and digital separately or combine within a project or a photoshoot? Let me know in the comments!

I will explain my current shooting workflow (I guess you could call it hybrid) in the next post, stay tuned!