Sometime around six months ago, I decided I really wanted a TLR. To be honest, it was the striking look of them that first caught my attention: elegant, antique, and fully mechanic. I also really liked the waist-level viewfinder, allowing photos to be taken more discreetly. At the time, that was about the extent of my knowledge.
New (old) cameras are expensive and I was still just getting into analog photography, so I decided to put off the purchase of a TLR until I was more confident in my abilities, and/or a sum of money fell unexpectedly into my lap.
Unfortunately, this is not a very frequent occurrence.
Fast forward through a very long and exhausting year, and I figured with my birthday approaching, now was as good a time as any to treat myself to a present. I did some research and then made an appointment down at the Film Experience Camera Store in Longview, AB (if you’re in the area and into anything related to film or photography, I highly suggest checking it out – it’s a photography lover’s paradise), where they just happened to have the camera of my dreams.
TLR stands for twin lens reflex, “twin lens” obviously referring to the two lenses on its front instead of the standard single lens, and reflex for the mirror that reflects the image from the upper lens onto the viewfinder. For a more in-depth overview of this camera and all its parts, I'll be posting a video soon; in this post, I’m going to focus more on what makes this camera different from a standard SLR, the challenges it poses, and my experience shooting with it for the first time.
First of all: this camera is heavy. It weighs nearly 2 kg with the lens, is made more or less of solid metal, and pulls down on your neck and shoulders like a rock.
The first time I used it I chose to haul it up a mountain, which I’m sure is great for building some sort of muscle I didn’t know existed. (For those wondering, all photos in this post were shot on Ilford Delta 100.)
As mentioned above, the viewfinder is located on top of the camera and is viewed by looking down at it from chest or waist height. The glass is significantly larger than any viewfinder attached to a traditional camera, and the image quality is fantastic, with an almost 3-dimensional feel that makes focusing on the subject easy, and is made even easier by a magnifying glass that flips down from the hood.
The catch: the image reflected in the viewfinder is mirrored to reality, meaning that when you move the camera left, the image swings right. The closer you are to the image, the more disconcerting this effect is. As an example, here’s one of the first photos I took, frantically swinging the around to get the horse and rider in frame before the opportunity passed. (It didn’t quite work.)
This camera is definitely a step back to the fundamentals, compared to the Pentax ME Super SLR I’ve been shooting with for the last nine months (which is still a pretty basic camera, but with a through-the-lens light meter and aperture priority). The C330 has no light meter, the shutter speed maxes out at 1/500 s and only goes down as low as 1 s (though there is a bulb option), and when using the “Multi” mode, the shutter has to be manually cocked before each shot. It’s a bit like trying to use a rotary phone after getting used to having all your contacts available at the press of the button: there are more steps to remember, it feels a bit unnatural, and, if impatient like me, you’re almost guaranteed to punch the wrong button.
All that being said, there’s a rhythm that’s relaxing to sink into, once you get into the habit: measure light, set aperture, set shutter, frame subject, set focus, snap photo, wind crank. Like all mechanical cameras, each step of the process is accompanied by a satisfying click or the physical feel of metal parts sliding together beneath your fingers. Something that connects you to the camera more than setting a DSLR to auto and hitting the plastic shutter button.
Somewhat unique to the Mamiya C-series is the ability to change lenses – most TLRs have a single fixed lens on the front plate, whereas the C330 has up to seven lenses that can easily be swapped out. As someone who likes having more options than they know what to do with, and also likes spending all their savings on camera accessories, this is a very attractive feature.
Also unique to the C-series is a bellows focusing mechanism, which is reminiscent of the large format press cameras of days past. As an admittedly shallow person (remember the reason I wanted to buy this camera in the first place?), my second-favourite thing about the bellows is the way they look, especially when fully extended.
My favourite thing about them is that they allow for an extreme closeup of the subject matter, considerably closer than most lenses, including macros – less than a foot, depending on the lens. For the 65mm lens I have, minimum focal distance is around 25 cm. This means, for the first time, I was able to play around with some close-focus still life setups, to varied success.
This is also the first camera I have that shoots medium format: the C330 takes either 120 or 220 rollfilm (with 220 being significantly harder to find these days) and captures 6x6 frames, or nearly 3x the size of a 35mm frame. From an aesthetic standpoint, this results in a much larger negative that can capture significantly more detail and be blown up to larger sizes without compromising quality.
From a mathematical standpoint, this means the light coming through the lens is captured on a larger area, resulting in an effective reduction in focal length and depth of field compared to a 35mm camera. Or in very simple terms, the 65mm lens on my camera gives equivalent field of view to a 36mm lens on a 35mm camera, and at its widest aperture of 1/3.4 and closest focal distance it can manage, the depth of field is a mere 3 mm.
I did this calculation after taking the following photo:
The shallow depth of field results in missing the centre of the rose, while the outer petals are in focus. I kind of like the soft, dreamy look of the resulting photo.
I shot this photo and the next one by hand, which I would not recommend for closeup photography using this camera for several reasons – the primary one being that the camera is heavy, and slight movements in your hands due to shaking or trying to get the shot framed perfectly results in the image moving wildly across the viewfinder in the opposite direction you think it should, which is extremely dizzying.
The second reason is parallax error. Parallax error is not something one has to worry about when shooting with a single lens camera. With a twin lens camera, because the image the photographer is seeing in the viewfinder is coming in through the top lens, it differs from the image coming through the bottom lens by a couple of inches. At a distance, the difference between what the two lenses are seeing is negligible (like when looking at something far away and closing one eye and then the other – the perception of what’s being seen barely changes) but for closeup photography, the difference can result in half the frame getting cut off.
The camera has a handy parallax indicator that pops up in the viewfinder, showing how much of the image will be captured on the film. From there, it’s a simple matter of raising the camera up until the upper part of the composition falls beneath this line. Easy with a tripod, but when holding a heavy camera with shaking hands at an angle while disoriented, it becomes a lot harder to estimate:
Despite the mistake made with framing, this is probably my favourite shot I’ve taken thus far.
Needless to say, two rolls in and I’m far from an expert with this camera. It’s clunky, and weighs enough to hurt my neck and bang painfully against my chest; it’s annoying to take the time to set exposure when the world around you is in motion and a photo-worthy moment is passing you by, and all too easy to forget to adjust aperture or shutter speed for changing conditions when they’re only shown on the front of the camera instead of in the viewfinder. The film crank sometimes gets sticky halfway through a wind cycle, and sometimes doesn’t automatically cock the shutter. The only alternative to watching the image move in reverse across the viewfinder is to look at it instead through the “sportsfinder” – which is nothing more than a square hole cut out of the focusing hood.
I love it.