How I Traveled To California And Almost Exclusively Shot Film
Last May my oldest daughter and I went on a trip to Southern California. She is a Photography and Graphic Design student at Greenville Technical College and wanted to see an exhibit of images from Brett Weston at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA). I decide to take two cameras on this trip: my trusted Fujifilm X-Pro 1 and a Fuji GS645S which I bought a couple of months ago and had not really used yet.
The Brett Weston exhibit was really great and inspiring, and my daughter and I where very impressed by the subject matter and how he executed his images.
Besides going to the exhibit and walking through Pasadena, we visited San Diego and several other places on the South California coast. We spent quite some time actually at La Jolla Beach Cove where a sea lion colony can be approached at very near distances.
To my own surprise I ended up using the GS645S far more than the X-Pro 1. I shot about 10 digital pictures and 60 on film. All film pictures are on Kodak Portra 400 and 800, using two rolls of 120 and one roll of 220.
The picture format, as the name of the camera indicates, is 6 x 4.5 cm with the standard orientation being portrait. Taking landscape oriented pictures however is quite easy.
The GS645S is very easy to handle. Although the aperture, shutter speed and focusing dials are all grouped together on the lens barrel, they are placed in a very convenient way and easily distinguished. It is a range finder type camera with a very bright viewfinder with clear frame lines and automatic parallax correction to assist framing.
I sent my rolls to be developed and scanned by Richard Photo Lab, and I am very pleased with the results. This GS645S / Portra combo probably is something I'm going to use more often.
I am also still very happy with the X-Pro 1 as the images below might show.
