Mamiya 65mm f/3.5

Today we're going to have a look at the Mamiya 65mm f/3.5, one of the two wide-angle lenses for the Mamiya twin-lens reflex system. The other was a 55mm f/4.5 that I've never used; the focal length seems very similar to the 65mm, and it's slow, and it doesn't appeal to me.

But then again lasagne never appealed to me when I was very young, and now I... I don't love it, but I can eat it. But the point still stands; I can change. I have learned to love lasagne, perhaps in time I might learn to love the Mamiya 55mm f/4.5.

In 35mm terms, a 65mm 6x6 lens is roughly equivalent to a 35mm, but taller, and the depth of field is about a stop depthier, so imagine that it's a curiously slow 35mm f/2.8 but you don't mind because you can hand-hold at 1/15th because the shutter - which is built into the lens - just goes snick and the camera weighs 2kg and you have to cradle it in your hands, which is good form if you ever have to lift things, because you're supposed to keep objects within your centre of gravity, and this is also why women don't have wombs on top of their heads - pregnant women would be unable to escape from predators because they would tip over, because their centre of gravity would be all over the place. Good job, evolution!

Mamiya TLRs have bellows focus, so the 65mm is actually a kind of 35mm f/2.8 Macro, because it can photograph bugs and things at or near life size. Close focus is surprisingly addictive:

The 65mm f/3.5 was one of the first lenses for the Mamiya TLR system. It was launched in the early 1960s and originally had a shutter speed range that topped out at 1/400; mine is a slightly later model that goes up to 1/500. The lenses were overhauled at the end of the 1960s and given updated bodies - the levers on my model resemble something from the pre-war years - and as far as I can tell production continued right up until the mid-1990s.

Perspective makes the TLR seem vast compared to the already-quite-chunky Pentax Spotmatic; the C3 is metal but mostly hollow, the biggest problem is finding a comfortable way to carry it.

The TLR range was discontinued in 1994, by which time it was an anachronism but still popular, because it was the cheapest way to get good-quality 6x6 medium format with several lenses and macro. 645 was popular at the time, but if you wanted professional 6x6 the other options were either expensive (Bronica SQ) or very expensive (the Rolleiflex) or astronomically expensive (Hasselblad) or much the same price but unreliable (the Kiev/Pentacon SLRs).

Charlotte Colbert's "In and Out of Space", which is really good and appears to have been shot on 5x4. Many years after writing this article - I wrote it back in 2015 - I realise that Dutch angles were fun in moderation but tiring when used all the time.

On a personal level I love 6x6. The square frame size means I have to think about composition; if I shoot square as I would shoot standard 35mm, I end up with pictures that seem to be empty at the top and bottom, so I have to fill the frame. Square format fell out of favour in the 1990s, and ironically it is now such a cliché of Instagram that it is in danger of falling out of favour again, although I still love it.

I edited this article in 2018. Auntie Karen has now been dead for three years.

Back once again with the renegade master

I never understood what he was singing. "Back once again with the renegade master / D4 damage with the ill behaviour". Was it a reference to the four-sided dice in role-playing games? Well, dammit, I need to know. Let's do some research.

The track samples "One For the Trouble", a 1994 hip-hop tune by ADOR. ADOR was actually a man called Eddie Castellanos, and ADOR stood for either Another Dimension of Rhythm or A Declaration Of Revolution presumably depending on how high he was. The lyrics of "One for the Trouble" went "back once again with the ill behave-ya, can you feel it / nothin' can save ya / 'cos the A for Allah / D for Damager / O for Outta Here / R for the Renegade / Master". Which spells out ADOR. Later on he wishes for power to the people. Wildchild took the vocals and cut them up. Now I can finally die, my mind is at rest. Thank you, YouTube.

The Mamiya TLR lens range majored on short telephotos, because it was aimed at wedding and portrait photographers. This is unfortunate nowadays - the telephotos are too specialised unless you really do plan to take lots of portraits with your TLR, which you'll probably only do once in a blue moon. With 6x6 I find that 65mm is basically a perfect walkabout lens, although the format is such that even 80mm feels a little bit wide. One for the trouble, two for hard times.

The focal length and aperture work against the typical medium / large format "3D look" - it's still there, but subtler

I used Fuji Superia. It was a cold day, and my lens had a peculiar thing where the shutter sounded as if it wasn't working properly, but in practice it was, perhaps because it was starting to gum up. My lens is half a century old, and probably hasn't been serviced ever. Despite this the speeds all seem accurate enough. Seiko obviously knew how to make shutters.

And that's the 65mm. You really have to want to carry around 2kg of camera; a Yashica Mat is much lighter and, by coincidence, a Holga has the same focal length, although you need a Mamiya TLR if you want 6x6 medium format and fine control and wideangle without spending a fortune.

Apropos of nothing, the actor and multi-talented modern cultural icon John Malkovich has recreated a bunch of classic portrait photographs, and yes you can see his bottom. The exhibition is called "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich", and malkovich malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich. Malkovich malkovich malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich. Malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich-malkovich multipass malkovich.

Malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich

Agfa APX 25: Whisper No

Mamiya C3 / 65mm f/3.5 / Notting Hill

A while back I bought a stash of old film on eBay, mostly without the packets; among them was a roll of Agfa APX 25, an old and very slow black and white film. It was introduced in 1989. Google Books suggests that it was discontinued in 2002 or 2003, with the last rolls expiring a couple of years later, by which time Agfa itself had collapsed.

With only one roll I had no idea what to expect, and I couldn't test it in any way, but I was pleasantly surprised. My approach to odd finds like this is to just shoot it; just flick the switch. "One more body amongst foundations makes little difference. Well? What are you waiting for? Do it. DO IT."

ISO 25 equals roughly 1/30th of a second, f/4 in overcast daylight, but this isn't a huge problem with a TLR. One of the best things about slow film is that you can use wide apertures in daylight, equals narrow depth of field, which looks neat. It brings in the punters.

I stand developed it with R09 / Rodinal, but despite this the result was basically grain-free. There is grain, but it looks like a low-level blur rather than individual little spots. APX 25 sharpens well, and generally it's very Photoshoppy - low contrast, good resolution, similar to digital but with low contrast. You can add your own contrast. Shame it was discontinued. I have no idea how the previous owner stored my roll, but in general slow black and white films seem to age well.

A couple of these images have a pattern, particularly the BMW. I'm not sure if this is from the film's storage or from my scanner's dirty glass flatbed. Half and half, probably.

"... in exchange for £1,200 a month"

Seriously, the old sharknosed BMWs were wicked cool. If I ever become a multi-millionaire I will either buy an old sharknosed BMW or a Porsche 912, which I will park on the street thusly, and never use - because I would already live in London. Heathrow is at the end of the tube and the rest of the UK isn't worth visiting.

There will be cocaine hidden under the seat cover in a ziploc bag inside a second ziploc bag, and many years later I will feel slightly sad that the police never stopped me, not once. It was because I looked too boring. And that hurts.

In an age of ISO 25,600, twenty-five is distinctly retro. As far as I can tell the only remaining slow film is Ilford PAN F 50, which I can't remember ever using. I'll have to dig into my box of things to see if I have some.

Mamiya 70mm f/2.8: Two Pianos

A while back I wrote about the Mamiya 80mm f/1.9, which was the Mamiya 645 system's big star lens. It was unusually fast for medium format and surprisingly affordable as well, albeit that the bokeh was quite rough.

The early 645 system had two other standard lenses. There was the 80mm f/2.8, which usually came with the camera, and the 70mm f/2.8, which was a specialised choice aimed at professional portrait and wedding photographers. Its gimmick, it's raison d'etre, was that it had a built-in leaf shutter.

Reala

Leaf shutters are blown across the stormy bay can synchronise with electronic flash at all speeds, which is important if you're shooting portraits in daylight and you want to use fill-flash. The 645 system ordinarily uses a focal plane shutter, which is mounted in the body of the camera. The most common type of focal plane shutter has multiple blades that sweep quickly over the sensor, and when people talk of focal plane shutters they're usually talking about this kind of shutter. Most modern cameras use this system, because focal plane shutters can fire at very high speeds, up to 1/8000 for the best. The downside is that they can only synchronise with electronic flash at 1/250 or so.

Older cameras synced at even lower speeds, and the focal plane shutter in my mid-70s Mamiya 645 1000S only syncs at 1/60. The absolute peak of 35mm film camera development topped out at around 1/300th (off the top of my head the Nikon F5, and one of the professional Minoltas from around that time, could reach 1/300th).

This isn't a problem if you never use flash, or if you use flash as your sole light source, if for example you're shooting in the studio. It does however become a major problem if you want to photograph a person outdoors in the sunlight, balancing flash and daylight. The archetypal outdoors daylight portrait looks something like this:

Ektachrome 160T / 35mm

The lovely Loren is lit from behind by the sun, so that her hair is lit up, just like the Bee Gees on the cover of their classic album Spirits Having Flown. That's the album they released just after Saturday Night Fever. It has "Tragedy" on it. The inside gatefold has a good example of slow-speed flash sync, which is another flash-related topic entirely. Suffice it to say that you can learn a lot about flash photography from studying album covers. And that's the 70mm f/2.8. Goodbye.

(rewind)

... lit from behind by the sun; it was a bright sunny day. I had the lens wide open in order to blur out the background, which meant that I was probably using 1/2000 or something similar. The problem is that without lighting up Loren's face, she would have been a dark silhouette. I needed to light her face. But how? One solution is to have an assistant hold a reflective panel just out of shot, but this is awkward if you're shooting a large group portrait, and difficult if you don't have a well-trained assistant.

Another alternative is to use bright constant light from a spotlight, but this requires a portable generator and a van and some power cables and clamps and a crew. And if you have access to a portable generator and a van, and some power cables and clamps, and a crew, why bother photographing people? You could probably make more money bundling pedestrians into the van, and threatening to have your crew clamp them to the generator unless they give you their bank details. You would be a modern-day pirate. A road pirate, with a van.

Provia again, for the first time

You can have a lot of fun with an electrical generator and clamps.

Alternatively you could use flash to fill in the shadows, but if your camera only synchronises with flash at 1/60 you can't shoot at 1/2000 any more. You have to shoot at 1/60, which means stopping down to f/16 or something horrible, or fiddling around with neutral density filters on the lens, at which point you're focusing and composing in semi-darkness.

For the shot of Loren I cheated and used technology. My old Canon 550EX has a high-speed flash sync setting that pulses the flash several times at the camera's sync speed. Most modern flash systems can do something similar. But before electronic trickery existed - I believe Olympus came up with the idea, in the 1980s - 1/250 was just about the best a photographer had. At that speed I would still have had to stop down, but only to f/4 or so, which is a lot better than f/16.

For the purposes of this post all of this information is basically irrelevant, because I only used the 645's focal plane shutter. In fact I didn't buy the 70mm f/2.8 for the shutter at all - I find that 80mm feels just slightly too narrow in 645, so I wanted a slightly wider normal lens. I don't plan on ever carrying the 70mm to a portrait shoot, it's too awkward and too wide.

Ektachrome EPP

Mine was cheap because the aperture blades are sticky. I have to toggle the stop-down lever a few times before they work, but in practice I shot most of the images in this post wide open, or I used the lens' MMU setting, which keeps the lens stopped down. The lens is nigh-on forty years old, and I imagine the lubricant has started to gum up. At this point a repair is uneconomical, and I'm wary of opening the lens in case I destroy the leaf shutter.

On an operational level the lens feels a bit of a kludge. It doesn't disable the 645's shutter, which fires as well as the leaf shutter. You have to set the 645 to 1/15 or similar, and when you press the shutter button the 645's shutter opens, then the leaf shutter opens and closes, and then the 645's shutter closes behind it. If you set the leaf shutter to "F" it remains open, and you can then use the focal plane shutter as you would normally.

The leaf shutter is essentially silent, but this doesn't help because the 645's shutter still fires, with a distinctive loud FLOP sound.

HP5

Ergonomically the 70mm's shutter cocking mechanism is as good as can be expected, with a pair of grips around the end of the lens. The procedure is laborious - and remarkably similar to the RB67, in that winding the film and cocking the shutter are separate actions - but I can imagine it becoming second nature. You wind the camera, twist the shutter, fire, wind the camera, twist the shutter, fire, repeat.

There's almost nothing on the internet about the 70mm f/2.8. Until the late 1980s it was the system's only leaf shutter lens, presumably intended for bride-and-groom shots. For the M645 Super, Mamiya introduced some other leaf shutter lenses - a 55mm f/2.8 (for group portraits), an 80mm f/2.8, and a 150mm f/3.8 (for head-and-shoulders). As far as I can tell there were no leaf shutter lenses for the autofocus 645AF, but the idea was reintroduced with the modern 645DF digital medium format system, which has a range of leaf shutter lenses, including a zoom.

Mariah Carey and Morrissey. I would pay money to see them do a duet.

Old 645 lenses can also be adapted for your modern digital camera, in which case the 70mm f/2.8 becomes a... well, it becomes a bulky 70mm f/2.8 with a built-in shutter that you can't use. Is that what you want? There are shift adapters, but do you want a 70mm shift lens? Do you? Hmm?

Provia 100

On an optical level I don't have a problem with the 70mm f/2.8. I used it purely as a standard 70mm. The shots on this page were almost all taken at f/2.8, using the 645's shutter. The bokeh seems smoother than that of the 80mm f/1.9, but still not particularly smooth; it has quite a bit of vignetting at f/2.8; if there's any CA, I couldn't see it; sharpness was just fine in the middle, still pretty good at the edges.

On an emotional level I still prefer using square format, as in this post about Mamiya's 6x6cm twin lens reflexes. 645 has the same 4:3 aspect ratio as Micro Four Thirds and old-fashioned televisions. and it feels a bit staid. I'm supposed to hold the opinion that aspect ratio is unimportant, and that what really matters is the brilliance of my compositions, but there's a reason Hollywood went with wider aspect ratios and stayed wide. My position is that a dramatic composition in a novel aspect ratio is more interesting than a dramatic composition in an over-familiar aspect ratio, and I'm sticking with that. Why is it more interesting? Because human beings are arbitrary, irrational creatures.

Many years from now, when people are sick of Instagram and widescreen - imagine being sick of Instagram! - 4:3 might well seem new; but I am living in the present. I write about the here and now, and individual people, the microscopic; not masses and not the future.

Jocular Foil Hog

Rage hard / into the light

in the words of Holly Johnson

In the last post I had a look at the Holga, a toy camera from the 1980s that became very popular with hipsters in the 1990s and remains so today. If the 1980s was a decade of perfectionism and gloss, the 1990s was a decade of scuzz and Super 8 and slackers and slack, and the Holga fit right in. It captured a society that had grown disillusioned with the notion of progress; it captured a new generation that stripped away the old rules, looking for new answers in one another's arms. What followed was a decade in which they won, and we lost. There was a test, which we failed.

The plastic lens and limited exposure controls lend themselves to black and white film, which is very tolerant of incorrect exposure, but there's nothing to stop you using colour film as well. Only your tiny limited mind and bedridden fingers and the ever-present fear of vampirism.

For all the shots in this post I used Fuji 160, which is roughly correct for overcast conditions, perhaps slightly underexposed. 400-speed film is more popular, especially e.g. Fuji 400H, because it easily tolerates overexposure (and actually becomes more saturated the more you pump it). Outside of England there is sunshine.

Colour actually makes the Holga's lens look even worse, because it shows up the truly astounding chromatic aberration. In black and white the Holga's dreamy look resembles something from the Victorian era, whereas in colour the Holga is revealed as a cheap plastic disposable camera. For this reason cross-processing slide film is very popular, in part because it looks fantastic, but also because it hides the grim reality of colour fringing.

Next, Milan.