Seagull 120 TLR – Introduction
[If you like this blog, please take a few seconds to take a look of the ads at the end of the post. Thank you. TLRgraphy will continuously collect the best information about twin-lens reflex cameras]
Introduction
I’ve been thinking about getting into medium format for a long time. I’ve owned 35mm Canon cameras for about twenty years, and a Calumet Cadetfor almost two, and I’m pleased with the results I get from both. The grain-free enlargements from 4×5 originals are great, and the convenience of autofocus 35mm cameras is really nice, but I kept longing for larger negatives than 35mm without the hassle of 4×5. Enter medium format.
After a few days of researching the subject, I found a few alternatives to$20,000 Rolleis and decided to try Calumet’s $120 offering: the Seagul WWSC 120 TLR.
Easy enough to use
These days, unpacking and using an autofocus 35mm camera for the first time can be daunting, even with entry-level bodies. The array of features is immense, and the manuals are often lacking. In contrast, the Seagull is Just Plain Simple:
- Open the camera, load film, close the camera
- Uncover the lens, unfold the viewfinder hood, compose, focus
- Adjust shutter speed, lens aperture
- Shoot, advance film
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Loading the film
There’s a rotating knob on the bottom of the camera, the exercise is to rotate it to the “O”pen position, and then opening the body. Load the film on the bottom, thread it, insert the leader in the take-up spool, remove the slack and advance it with the wind-up crank until the arrows on the paper backing align with the markings on the body. Close the camera. No surprises here.
Composing and focusing
The viewscreen is fairly bright, and there’s a built-in focusing loupe you can pop-up and help you focus. There’s also a split-prism focusing aid in the center of the screen.
Using a waist-level finder was a new experience for me. I got used to it fairly quickly, though I did have some surprise elements creep into the slide that I did not see while composing the shot. This is because of parallax: the viewing lens is slightly higher than the taking lens. With practice, however, you can learn to correct for this limitation. You can use an eye-level finder after focusing, basically, you put down the front side of the hood, and look through a square opening on the rear side of the hood. The focusing knob is well dampened, and it has the very useful DOF markings.
Taking the picture
The shutter goes from 1 second to 1/350, plus B, and since it’s a leaf shutter, sync is achieved at all speeds. There’s a self-timer, and you can screw-in a standard cable release. Neat feature: multiple exposures of the same frame are possible.
The camera does not have a built-in light meter. I’ve been using my Minolta Spotmeter F, and I shot a few frames following the Sunny/16 rule.
There’s a hot shoe on the side, above the focusing knob, and a PC connector on the front.
Unloading the film
Once you shot the last frame (you get twelve), you just keep on turning the crank until you hear the rollfilm leave the original spool. Crank a few more times, to be on the safe side, and open the camera. Moisten the paper leader, attach it to the roll, and pull the roll off the camera. Then take it or send it to one of the labsrecommended elsewhere in this website, or your favorite pro-lab.
Sharp lens, too bad the vignetting
I hope some day to have some sample scans online, meanwhile, you’ll have to take my word for it: the lens suffers from severe vignetting from f3.5 to f5.6, and moderate from f8.0 on. It’s tolerable, particularly with print film, past f16. However, I found the lens to be sharpest at f11, so if you like shooting slide film, you’ll have problems if your subject matter includes a lot of uniformly lit surfaces near the edges (say, the sky on a landscape).
Film choices
The camera only accepts 120 format film, contrary to what’s stated in the 1998 “Essentials” catalog from Calumet, which says it’ll take both 120 and 220. The number of available emulsions is higher in 120 format, but some people like having 24 exposures per roll.
Summary: a good value
If you’re looking for a new camera to get started in medium format, the Seagull WWSC is a great value, at around $100 or so. I’m not aware of cheaper MF cameras (I know about Holgas, but my definition of “camera” includes the term “light-tight box”…).
Yashica Mat 124G: Women and Dreams
[If you like this blog, please take a few seconds to take a look of the ads at the end of the post. Thank you. TLRgraphy will continuously collect the best information about twin-lens reflex cameras]
The Yashica Mat shoots 6x6cm negatives, which has the pleasant side-effect of making the photographs look like album covers, viz:
“Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn” indeed. Square images are hardcore, although in practice there’s no reason why you can’t crop them down to taste. You have plenty of negative to work with. Still, I find that after having composed the square image through the Mat’s square viewfinder, it looks better if I leave it square.
Square format was long a hallmark of Swedish medium format giant Hasselblad, although with a very few exceptions the company’s modern digital sensors have a 4×3 aspect ratio. Nowadays, for most people, square equals Instagram equals real photography.
Medium format is a mysterious world. “If you have to ask, you’re in the wrong department”, that kind of world. Historically there were several different medium format formats, although they all used 120 film, with different framing.
Why was it called 120? I always assumed it was because you could take twelve shots at 6×6, but in practice the number was just arbitrary; Kodak plucked numbers from thin air. Throughout the 20th Century the company also sold 110, 116, 616, 120, 126, 127, 135, 220, 620, and 828 film, and none of those numbers meant anything either. Nowadays Kodak still sells 120 and 135 – the standard 35mm format – but for how much longer, eh?
Hasselblad cameras shot 6x6cm negatives, and so did Rollei TLRs and indeed most TLRs in general. Bronica, Pentax, Contax, and Mamiya used a 6×4.5cm format, which was called645. This was the most popular medium format of all, striking a good balance between a large negative, economical use of film, and relatively compact bodies. Furthermore the 4:3 aspect ratio was much closer to a magazine page or an 8×10″ print than square format. I’m not sure why I keep saying was, because 645 survives to this day as the standard digital medium format format. Back in the 2000s Kodak made a square format sensor that went into the Kodak DCS Pro Back and the early Hasselblad CFV models, but if you walk of your local Phase One showroom with a digital back nowadays, it will be a 645 digital back.
It’s worth pointing out that Kodak’s square sensor wasn’t actually 6x6cm; it was 3.6×3.6cm and had a 1.5x cropping factor. As far as I know the only 6x6cm medium format digital camera was the Dicomed Big Shot, from way back in 1996, although it was a cumbersome beast designed for tethered studio shooting. As I write these words there’s one on eBay for £2,500, from Hong Kong, untested. You’d no doubt need a 1996 Apple Macintosh as well.
Still, some Pentaxes and Mamiyas shot 6x7cm negatives, and there were even 6×9 cameras, which squeezed eight large shots onto a roll of 120. 6×9 had a split personality. On the one hand there were tough professional 6×9 cameras such as the Polaroid 600 and the Fuji GW690 – the “Texas Leica”, so called because it resembled a Leica that had been pumped full of beef – and on the other hand, the format was common in low-end cameras such as the Agfa Clack, the idea being that the negative was so large that frugal holidaymakers could simply have contact prints made up, rather than paying for enlargements.
Moving into the realm of the esoteric, there were also 6×12 and 6×17 panoramic cameras, such as the Fuji GX617, which still fetches a fortune on eBay. In the right hands these can produce stunning images, and in the wrong hands they can produce boring dross, just like any camera. Also, look at this stupid-looking man. If the internet is to be believed – and I have no reason to doubt it – these cameras are only capable of taking photographs of (a) beaches at sunset (b) the Grand Canyon (c) leaves. Which gets boring after a while. Guys, you can stop now.
Still, have a look at this cropping guide:
That’s a full 6x6cm frame, shot with a Yashica Mat 124G. The yellow box represents the largest 8×10″ crop you can make from this negative, although there’s no reason why you have to include the full height of the frame.
The red box is the same relative size as a 35mm negative, 36x24mm. Put another way, you can crop down that much and still have 35mm quality. Incidentally, if you could somehow stick the Yashica Mat’s 80mm f/3.5 lens on a full-frame digital SLR – and assuming you left the camera in the same spot – that red box is what you would see. You’d have a slow 80mm short telephoto with, presumably, very consistent image quality across the frame, on account of the huge image circle.
With the exception of the cropping example, all the shots on this page were taken with Kodak Ektachrome, indeed they’re all from the same roll. With 6×6 medium format on standard 120 you get twelve shots, which seems ridiculous in a digital age; even at 21mp my 5D MkII can store hundreds of images on a 16gb memory card. A card that costs less than a five-pack of 120 film, that has no processing costs, and can be reused over and over again.
But, knowing that each image is costing more than a pound, and shooting on a tripod, I find that my strike rate has zoomed up. If the image doesn’t look good in the Mat’s preview screen, I don’t take the shot. And I’m not going to go the trouble of setting up the tripod and the camera just so I can unset it the fuck down again, so I’ve had to raise my game.
In theory I don’t need a Yashica Mat to raise my game. I could carry around a digital camera, and just hit myself on the face with a wet fish every time I take a bad picture. But in practice I’m not going to do that. Because I can’t be trusted. I know me.
The Mat, like most TLRs, can in theory be used handheld. Some people have no trouble with this. In practice I find that the reversed viewfinder and the odd controls confound me. Furthermore, I scout out the world from a height of just under six feet – which is where my eyes are – but the Mat is designed to shoot from waist-height.* So I use a tripod, like this chap here. As the man points out, the Mat has little feet, and so if you don’t have a tripod you can always rest it on a flat surface. It’s not too heavy for a Gorillapod, either. The camera is large, but mostly hollow, like the work of Béla Tarr, haha.
*PROTIP: Because you’re shooting square, if you want to compose and focus at eye level without using the useless sports finder, just hold the camera sideways! Turn your body so that the subject is ninety degrees to your left, bring the camera up to your face so that it’s ninety degrees from the horizontal – with the lenses pointing at the subject – and shoot. No, imagine that the camera is a glass of beer, and you’re really thirsty, and you want to photograph someone at the same time. So, just drink the beer and stand at right angles to the subject. Press the shutter. With the beer.
Look, it’s easier to watch than to describe. Unlike the work of Béla Tarr, haha.
As before, I used a Fuji S3 as a portable lightmeter / preview back. Here’s the S3’s rendition of a shot near the top of the article, processed to look a bit like Ektachrome:
Although I shot it at the same aperture – f/4 – and the same spot, the depth of field is much wider, because I’m using a smaller format. To get that field of view I shot at 30mm, rather than 80mm, although it’s complicated by the fact that I’ve cropped this square. The perspective is also slightly different, because I shot it from eye-level rather than waist-height. I have to assume that children or little people would use a TLR at about mid-thigh-height, and babies might as well just rest it on the ground.
There’s a whole industry of Photoshop plugins that apply different film looks to digital files, which will no doubt breed a future race of photographers who speak of the Ektachrome look and so forth, when in reality they’re waxing nostalgic for a simulation, a false memory. I’m reminded of this discussion here, in which a professional director of photography asks his peers how to recreate the Kodachrome look, before going on to describe something that doesn’t sound like Kodachrome at all, but an idea of what it might have been, based on the evocative name. An idea of a simulation designed to evoke a mood.
Source: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.sg/2012/01/yashica-mat-124g-ii.html
Why I love Mamiya C220?
I absolutely love my Mamiya C220 medium format film camera. This camera was made between 1968 and 1982 and still takes professional quality images almost a half century later. Now that is amazing! The fact that the camera is still relevant is a testament to the survivability and pervasiveness of medium format film and film cameras in general. The Mamiya C220 is a twin lens reflex (TLR) type of camera that takes interchangeable lenses. The C220f is the next generation of this camera and was manufactured from 1982 to 1995. I bought my C220 with a 55mm lens because of quality of the optics and it is suited for my type of wide angle photography. I also love this lens because I can focus as close as 9″ which affords me some incredible angles and perspectives not normally possible. If you want to try medium format film then this is an inexpensive way to explore this medium. On a side note the black lenses are newer than the chrome ones in case you are interested.
Top 3 Reasons Why I Love the Mamiya C220 TLR
- The C220 may be from the 1960′s, but it still produces professional quality prints nearly 50 years later making it timeless and a great investment.
- The C220 is fully mechanical and does not require a battery.
- The C220 is a medium format camera that produces those big 6×6 negatives.
There is something magical and beautiful about the 6×6 format to me. I just love that square look. A standard roll of medium format 120 allows 12 exposures. My RZ67 Pro II and Mamiya 7 Rangefinder are both 6×7 formats so I get 10 exposures per roll.
The C220 is known as the simplified version of the C330. One is not “better” than the other, just a few minor differences. The C220 requires you to cock the shutter separately. In regards to the shutter cocking, I actually prefer this method. It is probably because of my large format experience. The C220 is solid built and I use it with the traditional waist level viewfinder. As you might of guessed there is no meter in the camera and it is fully manual and no batteries are required! I also love being able to flash sync at all shutter speeds (through 1/500th). I prefer the lighter weight of the C220 over the C330 in most cases because I do a lot of hiking and climbing. I think the difference is a little less than a pound. The C330 (f/s) cocks the shutter when the film is advanced and it has a larger crank for advancing the film. Besides the auto shutter cocking and the parallax/exposure compensation arm in the finder, that is about it for feature differences. They both take the same lenses so you could have one of each if you prefer and share your lenses between them. For more detailed information on all of the various models go here.
If you are not familiar with TLR cameras, they are actually very simple to operate. You look through the waist level viewfinder (in my case) at the ground glass. There is a pop-up magnifier for critical focus. There are other viewfinders available for the C220 and C330, I just prefer the standard waist level viewfinder. You look through the top lens and you are taking your photo with the bottom one. The aperture and shutter are part of the bottom lens too. TLR’s eliminate the need for a big mirror which is a source of vibration and poor image quality in some cases.
You will find the C220 to be extremely quiet to operate and you can hand-hold slow shutter speeds (e.g., 1/8th, 1/15th, etc) otherwise not possible with a SLR type camera. Plus this camera is fully mechanical. Did I mention there are no batteries!
You may have to deal with the parallax issue from time to time, but this is not an issue for me typically. You will notice this in your closeup/macro photos the most. Basically, what you are looking at through your top lens does not exactly match what you are photographing with the bottom lens. To help address this issue you can simply look at the scale on the left side of the camera to determine your degree of error (e.g. 1, 1.5. 2) then refer to the lines in the top of your viewfinder to ensure you have all of the critical information in your scene. It sounds more difficult than it is in reality. There are accessories like the Parallax Paramender that you can find on eBay to address this but I don’t personally use this because I am not always shooting on a tripod with this camera. In regards to exposure compensation you can refer to this same scale for a range of correction from .25 stops to 2 full stops. For more detailed information on exposure compensation, go here.
I love to use this camera for street photography too. Be sure to read the tips I have below for using the C220 for street photography without a light meter. Depending on the exact C220 you have it could be over 40 years old and it is as relevant today as it was in 1968. A great place to view over 20,000 photographs made with the Mamiya TLR cameras is on the Flickr TLR photostream and their is an active discussion group here too. If you want to narrow in on just the C220 then there is a a Flickr photostream for this too.
Sample Photos
The square 6×6 format of the Mamiya C220 is part of the reason why I love making prints with this camera. Plus I get a lot of enjoyment using film and developing it myself. Shooting black and white film in this special camera is not only a lot of fun but don’t forget it still produces professional quality prints that will compete with almost any camera made today. For these photos I used Tri-X rated at EI1250 and developed in Diafine. Keep in mind this is a fully manual camera so there is no need to set the ASA (ISO) and you will probably need a light meter for most shots. I used a light meter for all of these photos but you can estimate your exposure on a normal sunny day using the Sunny 16 Rule and F/8 technique discussed below.
Fallen Trees – f/5.6 at 1/30th EI 1250
Woods Ave Trees – f/8 at 1/60th EI 1250
Tree Roots – f/8 at 1/30th EI 1250
Lime Kiln – f/8 at 1/30th EI 1250
Big Trees – f/8 at 1/30th EI 1250
Sunny 16 & F/8 Rules for Street Photography
When using a fully manual camera like the C220 or RZ67 Pro II there might be times when you don’t have the time to use a light meter. Street photography is a good example of a situation when you won’t likely have time to meter your scene because things happen too quickly. You can employ some old school rules to help you get the shot. If you haven’t tried these techniques go out around your city or town and have some fun with it. Leave your light meter at home!
The Sunny 16 Rule is an old fashioned method used to estimate exposures for daylight photography without a light meter. On a sunny day when your subject is in the sunlight you can set your aperture to f/16. Then you would set your shutter to the reciprocal of your film speed. For example if you were using Tri-X 400 your shutter speed would be 1/400 or the closest setting you have for your manual camera.
If you don’t want f/16 as your aperture for creative reasons then you can simply use the basic relationship rule between ISO, aperture and shutter speed to make changes. In general if you use a larger aperture (smaller number) you would increase your shutter speed. This is known an inverse relationship between the aperture and shutter. If you want to step down your aperture by two stops from f/16 to f/8 then you would increase your shutter speed by two stops in order to keep the exposure the same. If you think about it, it is logical. If you make the aperture opening smaller (bigger f/stop number) you have more depth of field and require more light for your exposure. On the other hand if you make your aperture open bigger (smaller f/stop) then you need less light for your exposure.
Photojournalists “back in the day” used a neat little trick that you can still use today. By setting your aperture to f/8 and pre-focusing they would typically get the shot. Use the Sunny 16 rule that I described above and you should be able to get a high percentage of keepers that should grab everything from about 6 feet to infinity.
Resources for TLR
Graham Patterson has compiled a lot of very useful information on the C220 that you may want to check out if you are interested.
Mike Rosenlof posted a review on Mamiya TLR on photo.net that is worth reviewing if you are interested in getting one of these cameras. You’ll learn more from the readers comments than you will via the article, but I would suggest reading both.
The TLR forum at photo.net is a good place to ask questions and learn.
Flickr has a Mamiya TLR discussion forum that is good two good general TLR groups with the first here and the other one here.
Be sure to leave your comments or suggestions at the bottom of this article. If you like my articles be sure to use the “Like” or “Share” buttons located at the bottom of each article so we can get more feedback from other photographers.
You can view more of my large and medium format images on my Flickr stream.
You can read more articles on large format photography by clicking here or on medium format here.
Source: http://blog.blackandwhitefineart.net/2011/01/mamiya-c220/
TLRgraphy 