I recently bought a Mamiya 645 1000s medium format film camera on ebay. I’ve wanted to try medium format photography for a very long time, but with the ready availabilty of my full-frame digital camera, it was easy to chalk this up as an idea for another day. With the dslr camera away for repair for over a month, there has been time to study and learn and embrace new-to-me tools and approaches to photography.
These are from my first roll (Kodak Portra 400) and I’m pretty happy with the results. I had some focus issues and I suspect this mainly had to do with my not understanding how to use the focus distance scale properly. The prism viewfinder is pretty straightforward and I think I focused correctly. Exposures looked good, too. But overall, the photos were not as crisp or sharp as I’d expected. I’m working on a second roll now and we’ll see if I can improve. In the meantime, I’m deeply happy every day when I wake up and remember that I am a photographer.
