Sunday night. I’m taking a low-key approach to things tonight. Gotta be low on bandwidth tonight, as I’m trying to download a product brochure for a Contax 645. The problem is that the brochure is a 40mb PDF document and I’m on dialup. The download is, at the moment, abut 14mb done. Pretty good, considering it’s going at 2.2 kbps. It’ll finish eventually. I may have to go to bed with the thing still running, but it’ll finish eventually.
Incidentally, I really really really want the Contax 645. Looking at what I do now, the equipment I have, the things I plan on doing, and the equipment I plan on using, say, 5 years from now, it has occurred to me that I need something a little more modern when it comes to my MF cameras. For medium format I currently shoot with two Mamiya RB67s and an old M645 1000s. Both good cameras, but neither can address some needs I either have now have or will have within a few years. One big thing is long-term viability of the system. The 645 I have now has been discontinued since 1985, and the RB, while still being made, is living on borrowed time, I think. Not that Mamiya will stop supporting the product any time soon, but it’s getting towards what I believe has been a very long and fruitful product run. They haven’t made new accessories or lenses or anything like that for the system for at least ten years, while Mamiya continuously releases new lenses, accessories, etc for their other, more current systems.
Another big consideration is the fact that I do not currentlty have a medium format camera capable of acting as a good digital shooting platform. I’ll never stop shooting film. And both of my existing MF (and LF cameras for that matter) are about all I ever need for shooting film. Shooting digital, however, is a different story. With medium format, you don’t just go out and buy a digital camera like you might do if you were looking for a 35mm DSLR. Rather, you just buy a digital back for the camera. 5 years ago you’d pay $28,000 for a digital back that would give you an 11 mb digital file. These days you can get a back that’ll give you a 53 mb file for about $6,000 and one that’ll give you a 150 mb file for about $15,000. So the prices on these things are dropping very quickly while the image quality skyrockets. It’s getting to the point where I can realistically see myself investing in an $6-10,000 digital back a few years down the road. The quality combined with the value and the digital workflow mean that it’s not just big production houses that can amortize the cost of a digital back in a reasonable amount of time. Digital backs are getting better while the price is dropping, and that also means that their realistically usable lifetime is going up by a large amount.
So you get the idea that I’ll be introducing some wholly digital methods to my workflow within the next 4-5 years. The problem is that neither of the cameras I shoot with now are really appropriate for the job. The 645 doesn’t have interchangeable backs, so it is completely useless for digital. The RB67, while it has interchangeable backs and is very capable of having a digital back mounted on it in a usable configuration, it is hardly ideal. It’s 100% mechanical, so it’s hardly ideal for use as a digital platform. Enter the Contax 645. It’s electronically-based, is nearly perfect as a digital platform, uses Zeiss glass, it has autofocus, has built in metering and automatic film advance capabilities, and is part of a system that is both well established now (though it’s only about 4 years old) and that will be supported and developed for a long time into the future. It would replace my current 645 but not my RB67, which I would still use for shooting film stuff that I need a leaf shutter for or just want a bigger negative for (the RB makes a bigger negative and therefore higher quality image than a 645 does). I just makes sense. I like it a lot better than its main competitors, those being the Mamiya M645 AFD and the Hasselblad H1. The former seems awkward in use and lacks fast prime lenses (which I prefer). The latter is on the same level as the Contax but costs almost twice as much while using many of the same Zeiss lens formulas.
So all I need now is $4,000.
The picture at the top of the post is another random picture I found while sorting through a bunch of old scans. I took it in Athens while walking to class in the rain one day. I love the way the world looks in the rain, sometimes. I took the picture on my old Nikon, back before it broke. A little while after that I sold my other Nikon and all my lenses and bought a Leica rangefinder. It was really nice, but given how little I used it for serious work, I sold it. I just couldn’t afford to keep it around. It’s been almost a year since I’ve owned a 35mm camera. I had assumed that I’d buy back into a 35mm system again by the end of last summer. So much for that. At this point, I don’t even miss the format. I’ve become such a stickler on quality that 645 is the smallest format I’m happy with any more. 35mm negatives just seem absurdly small to me now. They can’t produce the kind of quality I want. I’ll probably buy another Leica or a Nikon again eventually, but probably not ever for serious work.
Why am I rambling on about gear so much tonight? Guess it’s just what’s on my mind. At least I’m not freaking out about my future again tonight. I’m definitely in a more mellow kind of mood that I was either of the last two nights, as should be duly evidenced by the posts from both nights. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but know I need to give it time and do more research before I can really say which path is the right one. I know that going to Japan is the path that I want to take so much more than the other (that being NYC). It’s just that at the moment it appears to be about 10x as difficult to pull off. I know it would be worth the trouble though. Just a matter of figuring out how to actually do it.
Alright, I’m out of steam. I typed so much last night that I’m surprised I’ve written nearly this much tonight. You’d think I’d need a night off after doing something like 9 long emails, 3 weblog entries, and work on a script I’m writing. Go figure. Blah. And I’m spent…
