Friday, May 7, 2010

Mamiya 645AFD



Rented a Mamiya 645AFD from Samy's today. $50 for the weekend. $35 for 4 rolls of Fuji 220 ISO160. It feels weird shooting film again. I'm constantly looking at the back of the camera expecting something to appear.

It's weird. My initial impressions are:

-There's no vertical grip and no vertical grip buttons.
-There's 1 AF spot LOL! My D3 has 51 but none where I want them :(
-It's not much bigger/heavier than my D3
-There's no AFS on the Mamiya lens

My initial conclusions are that the camera feels like a blast from the past. I suppose all film cameras are blasts from the past but it does feel like I'm back in the 90's with this thing because of the buttons, the layout, the interface, etc. The camera syncs at 1/125th so I'll have to adjust to that when syncing with the AlienBees and see what happens. The fact that it uses ISO160 film is bothersome because I don't have a 160 ISO setting on my D3 so I won't know how the film is really reacting/interacting with the strobes.

I'm going to test it out over the next couple of days...

2 comments:

  1. Don't forget to shoot some with natural light and for that don't be afraid to try 800iso film or more. B&W film looks great too. Hopefully you'll love the feeling of having to wait for the lab to develop this stuff... definitely different. Have fun!

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  2. I just finished my first roll... it's such a different feeling when you can't verify whether or not the shot is/was good. The difference is that I've shot enough frames over the past year to have a "feeling" whether or not the frame was good. I hope the lab doesn't bankrupt me! haha :)

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