Shots from the third roll taken on a walk around the Tegernsee (roughly 20km). It was early afternoon on this roll, and the weather was starting to get worse.
Shots from the second roll taken on a walk around the Tegernsee (roughly 20km). It was late morning on this roll, and the weather was overcast at the beginning but clearing up later on.
Shots from the first roll taken on a walk around the Tegernsee (roughly 20km). It was early morning on this roll, and the weather was overcast.
Some test shots that I took with the Leica CL on color negative film to.
It turns out my eloquence, compared to the length of my post TODO list, is rather limited. Often I am out of ideas for filler text long before the end of a post is reached. In the past, I have tried to provide at least one line of text between the images of my “5 Frames” posts, but I feel like my lack of creativity is a hindrance. So from now on, I will use a different format: 1 title image, a little bit of context info, and then the remaining 4 images. Thus without further ado:
On a sunny day at the beginning of 2020, I did another trip to the Tegernsee with my trusty Hasselblad 503cx in my backpack.
I had a roll of Ilford HP4+ loaded and walked through the lovely town of Rottach-Egern.
The main goal in Rottach-Egern was to feast on a delicious piece of steak, and to enjoy the weather and the landscape.
There is nothing else to convey, so this post will be on the short side.
Please enjoy these 5 frames that I am quite happy with, as they seem to capture the mood of the day decently.
Shooting panorama photos has always been tempting to me. I have had my eyes on a Fuji GX617 for a long time, but I never could convince myself that it would be worth spending the necessary money. I considered other panoramic cameras, but none felt as exciting as the prospect of a high-quality medium format 6x17 camera.
For example, there is the Hasselblad XPan, which offers a 24mm x 65mm panoramic frame. A beautifully made camera (as far as I can tell from the pictures on the product page). But that camera is (used) as expensive as the Fuji, and compared to the near 60mm x 170mm the frame is tiny.
Another problem with the cost of those cameras and my urge to own one is my drive and spare time that I have available for getting my behind out into the wild to take pictures. And I have a lot of other cameras that want to be fed with rolls of film.
Speaking of other cameras: I do have a couple of cameras that would be suitable for panoramic photography if they are used together with smaller film sizes. A strip of medium format film in an 8”x10” film holder could give a frame of 61mm x 250mm, which would even make the Fuji GX617 look like it is coming in short a bit. The problem with this is mobility: A 8”x10” large format camera needs a tripod and the camera, lenses and film holders consume a lot of luggage space. It is tedious to lug around. And if you put in all that effort, why not directly use 8”x10” sheets of the film?
A 6x9 medium format camera, on the other hand, is quite easy to transport. You can get decent pictures, even when shooting handheld. And there are adapters that enable the use of 135 film. These adapters can be found cheaply on “the bay” from individuals that 3D print them. I acquired two sets of them. That way I could directly transfer the exposed film into another (previously empty) 135 film cartridge. (Note: 120 film usually is transferred from one spool to another when advancing frame by frame, while 135 film is spooled back into the original cartridge when all frames are exposed.)
I took a Voigtländer Bessa 6x9 and loaded the 135 film with the adapter. It is a simple camera with only a viewfinder and no rangefinder. Advancing film is done by rotating a knob. When used with 120 film, the frame numbering on the backing paper of the film is shown through a small window. This does not work with the 135 film, as it does not have said backing paper. I had to guess how far to advance, and I guessed with way more safety buffer than was necessary. With a better guess, I probably would have gotten about 10 frames onto the film (instead of 7).
While I usually use my Nikon CoolScan LS-9000 ED, a (nearly) 35mm (including sprockets) x 90mm frame does not fit into the mask of the 135 film holder. Luckily, I recently acquired a Howtek Scanmaster D4500 with scanning 8”x10” sheet film in mind. That gave me the freedom to scan the whole frame (including sprockets, which was never an option with the Nikon CoolScan). Unfortunately, dust is the mortal enemy of any drum-scanned image, and my apartment is a paradise for dust.
This is the fourth post in a series of duplications. It is the companion post to ”6 Frames - Eibsee With The Fuji GW690 III”, where I told you the story of a medium format camera that got dragged around a little lake at the foot of a tall mountain. But that story was incomplete until now. It is a story not just about a medium format camera, but about a 35mm camera, too.
As I already mentioned in ”5 Frames - Zugspitze With A Leica M6”, I went out with both the Fuji GW690 III and the Leica M6. The M6 was paired with a Zeiss ZM 21mm Biogon f/2.8 lens and fed with a couple rolls of Kodak Pro Image 100.
The lake is the Eibsee at the foot of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in the German Alps. And this is as far as I will go with the description of the trip. Following: A little bit of photography philosophy.
Claim: Photography is best enjoyed with patience. Observation: The more time I invest into photography, the more I enjoy it.
With this, I do not aim at the time one may invest into the process alone, but also the time invested into waiting before looking at the results. For digital photography, the time between laying eyes on a scene for the first time and having a look at the result is way too short for my taste. It goes “Ah, that looks pretty!”, *click*, a quick look at the tiny display at the back of the camera and the subsequent disappointment that it does not look exactly like what your eyes can see, often resulting in the picture going to the bin.
Only when I had enough time to forget the beauty of the scene am I able to enjoy the pictures that I had framed so long ago. Photos age better than the memory of the past. And with that memory lost in time, I am finally able to look at the images with a sense of pride and joy.
The story has been told so many times before. It was a sunny day, no rain in sight. A young lad was climbing a mountain to bring back visions from a faraway land. Or something like that. This post is about the Zugspitze. Again. Just like in the ”5 Frames - Zugspitze With The Fuji GW690 III” post.
The same old story. A different camera: The Leica M6 with a Zeiss ZM Biogon 21mm f/2.8 lens. A combination that should be familiar to the avid reader, as I have introduced it in ”5 Frames - Nebelhorn Again”. What a coincidence, that I may refer to a post that is titled “Nebelhorn AGAIN” in a post that I could have titled “Zugspitze AGAIN”. And both posts are about pictures taken with the same camera.
One may wonder: Why bother running around with two cameras, if you end up posting the “same” thing multiple times?
The Fuji GW690 III may be called a “Texas Leica” (as I have explained in ”5 Frames - A Texas Leica In Sydney”), and it is a rangefinder camera, but it still is a different beast than a real Leica. For one, it only has a fixed lens that is roughly comparable to a standard prime on a 35mm camera. Another difference is the size of the negative: The Fuji exposes a frame that is close to a whopping 6cm by 9cm.
The Zeiss ZM 21mm Biogon is a wide-angle lens, which makes it suitable for wide sceneries like landscapes (which is what I was aiming for on the peak of a mountain in the Alps). The camera is small, and with a suitable camera strap length, it may hang around your neck without the two cameras colliding. Both together make for a decent combination.
“What? 6 frames? SIX frames? But… but… but… it should only be 5! FIVE!”, you scream in horror. Well, maybe you don’t, but I’ll let my imagination run wild for a moment. As with every post, I started with the whole collection of images that I shot at the “event”, and then threw out the unlikely candidates. I ended up with these 6 frames and had a hard time to get rid of one more image. So I didn’t.
Following my adventures on the peak of the Zugspitze, I followed up with a walk around the Eibsee. This lake is at the foot of the mountain, and given the gorgeous weather, it would have been a waste to go home directly after reaching rock bottom.
Now that I have one more image than originally planned in this post, I need a bit more filler text to avoid overwhelming your eyes with all the colourful imagery. (You did not expect me to write all this so you have something to read, did you?) The avid picture viewer might have noticed a lot of lake-imagery lately. I am trying to do something for my physical and mental health, and I find walking around lakes calming and relaxing. There you have it: I am fat and insane.
Enough about me: The cameras that I took with me were the same as in the previous post (”5 Frames - Zugspitze With The Fuji GW690 III”), of course. A Fuji GW690 III and my trusty Leica M6. The pictures in this post are from the Fuji and were taken on Fuji NPS 160, a film stock I generally like quite a bit. Unfortunately it seems to be out of production and remaining stock is getting more and more expensive.
Now I am out of things to tell you. Maybe you are interested in learning, that walking around a mountain lake has its ups and downs?
I still have the images I took with the Leica M6 on the Zugspitze and around the Eibsee in the pipeline. And I have to come up with more filler text. This will be hard.
Enjoy the images!
Fin.