Yesterday I returned from Hilton Head, South Carolina. It was a wonderful week at the beach with my family, but I am enjoying the low humidity, mild temp, and beautiful sunshine today! I love visiting South Carolina, but I’m not acclimated to the humidity like when I was growing up there.

Anyways, I have a lot to catch up on for the blog! The week prior I was in California. We were in CA for one week, came home for three days, repacked the suitcases and went in different directions for the next week. The whole month of July absolutely flew by for us. It was an awesome month, but whew! But now we are back home for awhile and it’s time to get back into a routine (well, sort of).

If you follow the blog you know I have spent much of the summer playing around with film. I purchased a 35mm Canon film camera to get started. I’ve been having fun with that, but I REALLY wanted to rent a medium format film camera to see what they were all about.

I used our trip to CA as an excuse to rent a camera. I drove from San Jose to San Francisco to rent a Mamiya 645AF and an 80mm f/2 lens. It was not the camera I was hoping to rent, but it was all I could find. I have been reading a little bit about medium format film and so I was dying to try one out.

Even though the Mamiya wasn’t the camera I set out to rent… I… Had… A… Blast!!! I’m still not sure if it was the experience of using the film, the very low stress of shooting purely for leisure, or a combination of the two… But it was such an awesome experience. I am happy to report that I broke my habit of “shooting and peeking.” It took about a day, but after that I didn’t look down in search of my LCD screen! And I found that all of my thoughts about the exposure were present before I took the image, and not after.

This in itself felt more natural. It had a better flow. I would focus all of my attention for that ONE shot, release the shutter, and then (instead of studying an LCD screen) I looked up from the camera at my subject and enjoyed it that much more! It was very relaxing.

I was happy when I got an email from RPL less than a week later saying that my film was ready! I couldn’t wait to download those files. Once I did, I looked at the pictures over and over again. Studying them; the exposure, the framing, the focal point, etc. Almost immediately I knew what I would’ve done differently or what I loved about each picture. Overall I was very pleased with the results. I have since looked at these pictures several times to continue to study them. I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I feel pretty good about my first encounter with medium format film. I really do love them, and I hope you enjoy them too.

Since our trip to CA started in San Jose, I will show you those pictures first.