So I’m selling off most of my medium format gear. I’ve been using a Mamiya RB67 for the last four years and its time with me is drawing to an end. I have, at this point, amassed two bodies, a prism, three lenses, two film backs, one polaroid back, and a couple lens shades. It’s a solid film system, but sadly it makes about the crappiest platform for a digital back out there (outside of an empty shoebox and a magnifying glass, anyway). Given my plans to get into digital in a rather big way, I need to switch systems to one that is a good platform for digital. I’ll rent a few different systems to try them out before I settle on anything, but right now the main candidates are the Mamiya RZ67, the Contax 645, and maybe the Fuji GX680 III. I feel like I’m forgetting one or wo, but oh well.
Chances are I’ll shoot 35mm for personal stuff until I go to grad school, at which point I’ll get new MF and digital gear with some huge fucking student loans. One other reason to get rid of the RB gear now is that it will let me pay off my credit card and get a 35mm scanner so I can start putting new photographs online.
Related to that, what I think I’m going to do is install gallery software on my server so that I can maintain albums similar to the ones on Fotki, only they’d be on my server running parallel to this weblog. This would allow me to easily share a lot of photographs with people, and it would also allow me to set things up so that if someone happens to want a print of something, they can just order it online for a few bucks and I can have it in the mail a couple days later. We’re talking maybe $10 for a 5×7 print mailed anywhere in the US, $12-15 internationally. Figure 50% more for an 8×10, larger sizes on request.
Enough of this for now. Time to do some reading and studying and getting shit organized for the start of the week tomorrow. Another entry later tonight.
