Earlier this summer I bought a second-hand Fuji GW690ii, a 6x9cm medium format rangefinder with a fixed 90mm lens (equivalent to about 35mm full frame). It takes film. Mention this to most people in 2015 and the immediate question is why you would want such a thing. In my case it was a mixture of curiosity (could I take film images that I actually preferred to digital ones?) and long suppressed equipment envy (I would have loved to have medium or large format equipment in the 90s, but back then it was way beyond my budget). But mostly I thought it would be a fun diversion.
Over the course of the summer I’ve shot just enough on the Fuji (two rolls, that’s 16 exposures, total!) to form some first impressions…
The tale of the tape
Out of the box the first impression is that this is a large camera. Large enough to amaze, amuse or horrify your friends, depending on their inclination. It’s not, however, tremendously heavy. It tips the scales at about 1.5kg (a little over 3 pounds), which is actually lighter than my full-frame DSLR (a Canon 5D3) with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. I’ve mostly used a tripod, but hand held shooting is perfectly feasible. Discrete shooting, less so.
The shooting experience
Coming from an SLR / DSLR background, the main challenge to using the Fuji is mastering the rangefinder focusing system. The optical finder has a small bright spot at its center, which shows horizontally displaced double images that snap together when focus is achieved. For those with long memories, it’s quite like the split-screen focusing that used to be a staple of film SLRs. For subjects that are basically stationary, and which have prominent vertical lines, it works extremely well, and very little practice is needed to focus quickly. Moving subjects – a field of flowers waving in the breeze for example – are doable but a good deal more challenging for a beginner.
Focusing apart, the rest of the camera works very much like an oversized SLR, though as there’s a leaf shutter both the aperture and the shutter speed are set via rings on the lens. You don’t have to worry about running out of battery as there is no battery – the operation is fully mechanical and there isn’t even a light meter! I bought a hand held light meter – which does wonders for one’s professional image in the field – though I’ve mostly been using the Fuji side by side with other cameras that can be used as glorified light meters. Minor hassles with metering apart, I’ve found it a very easy camera to get to grips with.
The workflow
Having some fun with film need not imply all out luddism. I don’t have any inclination to process my own film (even though for B&W it’s not that hard), or to print it optically. Scanning and then processing / printing in the same way as my digital images was therefore the plan. I choose a 6x9cm camera, in part, because the large negative size allows for decent scans from an inexpensive flatbed scanner. For the first few rolls, however, I got low resolution scans made at the time of processing, and had the best looking image drum scanned at high resolution.
A first comparison with digital
You certainly don’t buy a film camera in 2015 with the idea of getting a sharper or objectively “better” image than high-end digital equipment. But it’s hard to resist seeing if there are any obvious differences in the look. I took both the Fuji and my normal camera (a Canon 5D3 with 24-70mm lens) to Iceland and shot a few roughly side-by-side frames. Here’s the spectacular Gullfoss waterfall, in harsh direct sunlight in the early afternoon. Conditions for sightseeing rather than making good photos.
Both images have been processed to taste in Lightroom (darkening the sky in the Canon frame by pulling out the blue in the B&W conversion). You can’t say anything about sharpness from this comparison – it’s a low resolution scan and the jpegs are smaller still – but to my eye the overall look of the images is pretty similar. The only real difference comes from using a slower shutter speed on the Fuji frame (ISO 50 film is slow, and I used a red filter with a 3 stop filter factor on top).
Detail rendering
The black sand beach at the outlet of the J