Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

it’s been a few weeks since I made a blog post, I’ve been caught up in building websites, learning about video, and also suffering from the general malaise that seems to come at this time of year. However, this does not mean that I have had no ideas for blog posts. Quite the contrary, it seems the less I blog, the more ideas I have. Anyway, I’m hoping to rectify this so here goes with the first one.

My last few blog posts included lots of talk about the discontinuation of Quickload and the end of large format and film photography as we know it. However, there have been quite a few small bits of news that have reassured me that film photography and large format will be around for some time. Firstly, Fuji have announced a new film camera; the Fuji GF670 is a medium format, fixed lens rangefinder (an 80 mm prime lens) which allows photographs to be taken either as squares or as 67 (actually 4X5 ratio). Whilst this does not have any implications for large format photography, it does show that Fuji have a continued interest in film photography (probably).

The second, and for me more important piece of news is that Kodak have released a new film in 4X5 and 8X10 formats. Kodak Ektar 100 is a negative film, supposedly very similar to Kodak Portra but with more saturation than Portra VC and better scanning capabilities. The announcement of the film itself isn’t particularly important, what is important is that it signifies Kodak’s continuing interest in the large format market.

Between these two pieces of news, we have a strong indication that film will be around for some time to come and that at least one of the major film producers still has a continuing interest in large format. And I suppose one of the good side effects of the discontinuation of Quickload is that more people can now use sheet films such as the new Ektar, Portra and other films (and for a substantially cheaper price than Quickload).

I have also been buying various bits of new photographic equipment. The main item being a Panasonic GH1, a micro-4/3 camera with excellent video capability. I have the new RF 75 Lee filter Kit also which has so far worked very well indeed. One thing to bear in mind with the Lee RF 75 system, is that the hard grads are very hard indeed; I would recommend purchasing a soft grad as well. I have also bought a PhotoBackpacker rucksack which so far has proved a lot better than carrying heavy loads. I will try to write a review of these new items over the next week.

Oh, and I’ve also been playing with speech to text converters (Dragon Naturally Speaking) which is taking this blog down as I speak it at (almost) full speed. Definitely faster than I can type anyway.

Finally, I’d like to take the opportunity to tell people that the large format workshop in April is nearly sold out, there are only a few places left so if you are interested I would recommend booking now. Myself and Dav have spent some time putting together a small video to promote the workshops which I’m editing this week. Working with video content is a whole new ballgame but one which I am trying nonetheless. I will probably write a short blog post about the video production at some point, although it might not be interesting to many people, it might help me remember what the hell I’ve done from one day to the next. My phone off and then thealt. you an hour of work okay until you how much else at my sister’s (heh… don’t leave the speech conversion on when you are on the phone!!)

p.s. Found a comparison of Ektar 100 and Velvia 50 here