For the past couple of weeks it’s been heavily overcast or very stormy; altogether dark and gloomy with flat light. One afternoon the sun shone through a gap in the clouds near sunset, for perhaps 20 or 30 minutes. Long enough for me to get over to Ross Bay and shoot some waterfront scenes.
I am still trying to come to grips with the Fujica GW690 – I sure love the large negatives, and the lens is very good, and the simplicity of the camera very appealing. Using a spot meter is a bit tricky as I don’t really know what to metre on, so I have mostly been using incident light readings and then adjusting as seems necessary. Such as in this first shot which I dropped an f-stop or more to expose for the whites.
This was shot with Fuji 400H. I am finding it pretty hard to scan. I need to redo my scanning workflow I think.
There are a few more images from this same roll of film on my blog at 6×9 Ross Bay – those shots are taken as the light changed, with the sun being veiled by cloud.
Sunrise earlier in the week
Ross Bay looking to west
Cemetery “hedge”
White house east point of Ross Bay
Roll 48: Fujica GW690 with 90/3.5 lens, Fuji 400H metered at ISO400, commercially developed, scanned with Epson V700.
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52 rolls 
Would you also be shooting B&W film on your GW? Should be interesting 🙂
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Hi Ashoke – thanks for the comment. I have shot one roll of XP2 (http://wp.me/p2ZmXf-6MF) if you put chromogenic film in the black and white camp. I have shot only 3 rolls so far, and have been mixing new with expired films – mostly because I have the expired and thus it is cheaper for testing. I very much like how the XP2 came out and when I was shooting the first image on this post I was thinking in black and white terms so I may yet convert some of these to black and white. Besides that, when the light levels improved I will be shooting some slower black and white as well.
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ohh yes!! How silly of me! I’d read that post, and how the prints on the paper backing were showing up on the negatives.
On the bright side, I now know what chromogenic films are!
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I converted a few and they came out quite well. One of them is on my blog now here: http://wp.me/p1R4lY-7gR
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The mono conversion came out great!
I do that sometimes, and am amazed at how the picture looks completely different!
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Thanks! It can make a huge difference. This one I cropped a bit, which it needed I think.
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Ohh yes…cropping was highly underrated in my eyes, until I saw this (see last picture)!!
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Hey, thanks for that link! It has a link in it that is great too. Really nice to see. And, given he was taking photographs for 5 hours in that sitting and he still ended up having to crop so heavily is very interesting, and a bit reassuring too!
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Reblogged this on burnt embers and commented:
Here is the rest of today’s roll of film shot with a Fuji GW690. The light was excellent and transitory, lasting for a short time. Fortunately long enough to finish a roll of film with satisfactory results. The rest of this roll is published on my blog earlier today at http://wp.me/p1R4lY-7gB.
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Nice shots! I really like the first 2. If I was using spot metering on the first image, I would probably metered the house since that would be my subject and adjust my shutter speed or aperture from there. I use a modified version of the zone system to compare the contrast in the scene. I would have probably reduced my shutter speed to maintain as much shadow detail as possible and then bring back the highlights in the scans in Lightroom if necessary. However, I believe incident metering would have been just as good if not better in this situation because you and the house appeared to be in the same light. Incident is King! Depending on the scene and how much time I have, I usually take a spot and incident reading.
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Hi shutteringthrulife – thanks for the comment and info on metering.
I did try metering the house, but was not confident that was the right thing to do, so reverted to an incident light reading and then adjusted it a bit. I don’t recall if there was a wide difference in the two readings. For the sunrise shot I spot metered on different clouds to get a sense of the range of values and ended up choosing one of the brighter clouds and using that exposure value.
For some of these shots, I had to claim the information I was looking for in the scanner; I think that some exposures were not great though I find it hard to read negatives (even really big ones). In any case, they must have been in the ball park because I could pull something out of them.
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The white house is really striking. I saw this post a few weeks ago on email, but have been slow to comment
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Thank you Peter. I converted that one to monochrome and think I like it better that way. Eventually it will show up on my blog, but in the meantime it can be seen on my instagram, with all the attendant deficiencies of that platform. https://www.instagram.com/p/_j9nEhivpL/
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