In late April of 2012, I borrowed my father’s Jeep and packed my cameras into flight cases for a whirlwind tour of the southwest (Colorado and Utah, and The Navajo Nation) with Kate. I took my Crown Graphic 4×5 press camera, two Minolta bodies (an SR-T200 and the XE-7) and the Yashica-D 6×6 TLR. Kate took my dad’s old Pentax ME-Super, which he and mom pawned off on me last Christmas.
I packed Fujichrome Provia 100F for the 35mm bodies, Kodak Professional Portra 160 for the medium format and three different 4×5 color transparencies: A brand-new box of Provia 100F, a box of Velvia 50 that expired in 1994, and box of Kodak Ektachrome 64 that expired in 1978. My goal? Give landscape photography a more serious try than I have before.
Seen here are some of my favorite frames from the Yashica-D.
I encountered one technical problem: I think the Portra must be thinner or have thinner backing paper than the other 120 films I’ve used. The Yashica’s automatic film counter advanced past the first 2-1/2 frames of film, and as a result the 10th exposure on each roll was cut in half (with a tape mark across the middle, too), and frames 11 and 12 were taken on blank backing paper. I was disappointed to find 18 frames ruined or missing due to a technical glitch.
Nearly all of the medium format frames I made were in Colorado because we were more focused on covering ground once we got back to Cortez and plotted a course for Denver. The 4×5 is too tedious to set up for most side-of-the-road shots, I think. The TLR does nicely, though. While in Utah and The Navajo Nation, I used the 4×5 more than the Yashica.
So these were obviously taken with Kodak Portra 160, developed by Englewood Camera and scanned on my Epson Perfection V600. I made especially sure everything was clean when scanning these, but still had a few specs of dust that I removed with Photoshop. The hue and saturation are untouched, and the exposure nearly untouched.
I hope to find time to edit and post a few of the 4x5s and some of the 35mm frames before too long. As you can see, I’m working with a 4 month backlog right now.