Farewell Medium Format

It’s all change at snowhenge headquarters. I’ve recently divested myself of all medium format film cameras, but also all unessential digital stuff which I have acquired over the years. There is no question that I truly love the look of medium format film, especially Kodak Portra 400, but also Fuji 160NS and Kodak E100. But the problem is that I have never found a medium format camera that really works for me. The Bessa 667 III is a beautiful camera which works extremely well - but it has a 50mm equivalent lens, which has never been my thing.  Then there’s the Linhof 612PC. Maybe if I’d bought it 20 years ago, it would have been different, but my 4 year experiment with hasn’t yielded much. It’s a fascinating device, but it is just too cumbersome to use. A big attraction for me, coming from the XPan, was the 8mm fixed shift lens. But the problem here is that it is a positive shift. I usually need negative shift. No problem, you can turn the camera upside down - it even has a tripod socket on the top plate. But unfortunately you can’t fix the viewfinder to the bottom plate, and accessing the lens controls upside down is a recipe for disaster. In most scenarios I get into, it becomes a very unenjoyable experience. On top of that, despite the huge real estate on the body, Linhof contrived to create a design where no known Arca plate could be fitted (to be fair I don’t think removable plates existed when the camera was designed, but still…).  So I had to use a neolithic screw fitting tripod head.  And finally, unless one is very, very careful, the 612 film winding mechanism has a very nasty habit of overlapping exposures. On top of that, the 58mm lens flares badly. I hope the new owner finds it more amenable than I did - at least I sold it at a fair price.

So that’s it - apart from the Hasselblad XPan, I’m out of film.

This does actually carry on with what I wrote in an earlier post: “what is dawning on me is that by and large for me shooting film is mainly about finding something to point the camera at, whereas shooting digital is about wanting the photo”. I’m more sure than ever that this is the case for me.

But it’s not even just film. I’ve also sold off my Sigma sd-H, with its lead-lined lenses. It can produce great results, but again, it is very cumbersome, and it only works in very specific lighting situations. I never found a niche for it. My idea was that it would extend the scope offered by my Quattro dp0, but in the end it didn’t: it doesn’t offer the portability of dp0, and the Art lenses, while excellent, are not as good as the dp fixed lenses. So the dp0 stays, but the sd-H is gone. So all that remains is a two-body Olympus OM-D setup, with a generous number of lenses. Oh, and the Ricoh GR, which earns its keep.

All this sell-off (which went very well, and very painlessly via ricardo.ch rather than eBay) has generated a quite reasonable pile of cash. I have imposed a rule on myself that by and large I’m spend no new money on camera gear.  New has to be paid for by old. In this case, the cash hasn’t sat around for long, and my latest acquisition, which I’ve been dithering about for years, has just been delivered and is waiting to be opened. It’s by some margin the most I’ve ever spent on camera gear (the record so far is probably the XPan, which with all lenses must have come to around €4000).

But more on that some other time.