Vicki and I traveled to the North Norfolk coast during a rare sunny weekend. I took along my Fuji G617 monster camera complete with rollbars as she calls them. The thing really is ridiculously huge.
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| Fuji G617 (6x17mm negatives) |
The Norfolk coast is lovely but we have really been there only once before when we first moved to Cambridgeshire. This time again we headed for Wells-Next-The-Sea but detoured to Little Walsingham on a lark. It is known as a very popular medieval pilgrimage destination until Henry VIII had it torn down and sold in 1538 along with most Catholic monasteries of the time.
It is a beautiful little village and the shrines and religious sites have benefited from an early 20th century revival. Many still come for pilgrimage and religious contemplation. We were blessed with a lovely day and a very uncrowded village. This was probably because in the good weather Wells and the surrounding beaches absorbed most of the hordes. We counted ourselves lucky and visited the shrine and walked to the edge of town to the small Catholic church the Slipper Chapel. Later we ate lunch at the Bull (not the papal kind) and visited the ruins of the Abbey afterwards.
The G617 only takes 4 photos per roll so I have a few photos that I would consider presentable. The G617 is a challenging camera. I did not use a tripod for any of these shots. It is big, the wide aspect ratio means one must watch the level carefully, there is no way of seeing the focused image. Everything is manual and the front center filter means you have to remember to compensate by a stop or two. I find it is like I am starting all over again in many ways. In other words lots of fun.
I started out with a roll of Portra 800 film from Kodak. I hadn't shot this before but I liked the speed for hand held work to keep the aperture small as I had to judge focus. Depth of field is your friend here. Never the less the depth of field scale only starts really at f11. I was very pleased with the film. It has the famous high dynamic range of a print film and I could only perceive grain when I got the exposure horribly wrong. With the center filter I metered all shots at ASA 400.
Here are some conventional landscape shots. The first four are on the Portra 800 film and I can thank Colorperfect and ColorNeg for the great color rendering. I have never had such satisfactory results with print film before I used this sofrtware.
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| A Bridge on the Abbey Grounds |
The bridge turned out nicely. Lots of detail in the shadows and good highlights in the sunshine.
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| Walsingham Street |
The street in Walsingham above shows the wide format very well I think.
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| Abbey Gate Ruin |
Here is an attempt at a vertical shot. These are challenging to take and compose as we have no level to reference. Also not many subjects suit it well.
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| Shrine Grounds |
This was the first photo I took and it was very poorly exposed probably 2-3 stops. It exhibits a lot of grain as a result.
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| Stream on Abbey Grounds |
This final photo was taken with Fuji Velvia 100F. I really like how this turned out. The wide aspect ratio captures the length of the stream nicely. The photo captures for me exactly the feel of the scene. The exposure was very good as well.
I do not like Velvia 100F which I bought when I did not appreciate the difference with Velvia 100. Velvia is more saturated and makes for nicer colors I think. Fuji took this as a fault a attempted to rectify it with 100F which probably has more accurate colors but does not usually reflect how I see an outdoor landscape.
One thing I realized with this camera and the 105mm lens is that although it is panoramic and therefore one assumes landscape images at infinity it is actually well suited for certain mid-range subjects with foreground 5 or so meters away. This means I have to keep my eye out for these types of subjects.
The minimum focus for the lens on the G617 is 3m/10ft but with a small aperture closer should be possible. I also want to experiment with closer range subjects.
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