Sean Esopenko

Honeymoon in Hawaii – Purchased 4×5 Camera

August 21, 2010

It has been about 3 weeks since the last blog post because Luba and I were just married. (Surprise!) We got back from our honeymoon in Oahu, Hawaii a couple days ago. We enjoyed the trip, overall. Honolulu is busy and dirty. The north shore is beautiful and serene. I took the opportunity to purchase a large format camera at a great price while I was there. I bought an older model Wista 45 with rear tilt movements on the horizontal axis, bed drop, front rise and front tilt on the vertical axis. It came with a Fujinon 180mm F5.6 lens. The lens’s markings are on the outer region of the lens barrel, placing it after 1978, meaning it’s multi-coated.

I also got a matching roll back for it but the roll back has a light leek; the 6×9 images have to be cropped to about a 4×5 aspect ratio until I fix the leak. It was all had for about $530 USD. The lens looks like it was dropped at one point with a dent in the metal surrounding the rear element but there’s no hazing, no scratches and the shutter is bang on. Oh and they had new “odd-ball sized” filters in a bin for $5 each. The 180mm lens’s barrel was an “odd-ball” size… Cha-ching!

Rainbow Photo & Video in Honolulu processes B&W 4×5 so I got some sheets done by them along with a couple rolls of 120mm film. I waited until I got home to get the velvia processed because the costs in Hawaii were too high (more than double). The airport security was a bit of a stress because they were all so inconsistent on whether they were going to x-ray my film or not. All in all my film was x-rayed about 4 times which hopefully won’t make a huge difference. The iso 400 black and white wasn’t affected, it appears, so hopefully the costly velvia wasn’t.

This is an image shot from my balcony with the roll-film back. It’s Kodak iso 160 film that was cropped down to hide the light leak from the holder. I tried for the “fake miniature” look but I think I used too narrow an aperture. I shot it at about F22 when I should have used around F12 or so.

I like the colour and the resolution is amazing. A sharp scan at about 3200 dpi gives the equivelent of a 48 megapixel image before cropping out the light leak. It was scanned on an epson V700. I have a few black and white sheets to work on more however my scanning technique needs to be improved. I still have to nail down dust management because Digital ICE (automatic removal of dust & scratches) doesn’t work for black and white film. It has to do with infra-red light not being able to pass through the silver of the black and white negatives.

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