An island of rocks and trees in a large field.
From 1984 until 2000, I had commercial photography studios in Chattanooga. The last and best one was at 730 Cherry Street, downtown, where I worked from 1993 to 2000.
By the late '90s the studio was just barely paying its own way. More and more of my work was done on location, and the income derived from in-studio photography was at best only covering the costs of operating the studio. A no-brainer. A sad one, because it was a great studio space and I loved working there, but a no-brainer nonetheless. It was time to move my business home and use my basement as a studio.
In preparation for the move, I began to reduce my equipment inventory. I sold my Cambo 4x5 view camera and my medium format Mamiya RB67 and their lenses and invested the money in a Fuji GX680, which I thought would be able to do the work of the other two. Although the format was smaller than 4x5, it was larger than the RB, and also used cheaper 120 roll film. It also had front-standard movements, which offered some perspective control, like the 4x5.
The GX680 was very capable and I liked it, but it was a big, heavy beast of a camera! In 2003, again reading the handwriting on the wall, I sold it to buy my first digital camera.
Sometime in the winter of 2001, I was on my way home from Nashville, driving down one of the old U.S. highways (41 or 41A), when my eye was caught by a small island of trees in the middle of a large field. It was surrounded by a ring of very large rocks, which had apparently been dug out of the field in years past to make it usable for farming. I had the trusty GX680 with me, of course (I seldom go anywhere without a camera), so I pulled over and made a couple of exposures on Ilford Delta Pro 100 black and white film, which I processed in Kodak T-Max developer and scanned on my old but still good Epson Professional 4990 scanner.
First Presbyterian Church, Chattanooga.
I also had some pictures of Chattanooga's First Presbyterian Church on that roll, part of a project I was working on at the time, so I'm including one of them to show how the front rise movement of the GX680 enabled me to keep all the vertical lines vertical without showing too much of the street in the foreground.
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Photography and text copyright 2001-2025 David B.Jenkins.
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That's a fine photo of the rock and tree island. And I admire all those straight architectural lines. I thought about buying a tilt-shift lens for my Nikon cameras, but they are expensive and you have to buy each focal length separately. I can make lines vertical in Lightroom, but the 'stretching' seems to result in a loss of quality.
ReplyDeleteI once borrowed the G680 from a lab I frequented. He had long switched to digital so I asked if I could try it. I bought a roll of Velvia 50 film for it but couldn't do anything with it. And it was too big to carry anywhere, especially because I don't have a car. Still, it was nice to try.
Thanks for your comment, Marcus. When I was shooting Canon and architecture was a good part of my business, I had the 24mm tilt/shift lens, and also a Nikon shift lens in 35mm that I used with an adapter. That pretty well covered my needs.
ReplyDeleteThe GX680 was a monster, best used with a tripod.