6x17 a wide journey Posted On 6th August 2024 To Magazine & Stories

“You learned the Mr. Miyagi way”

Hi, Carlos here, my story with film photography started in the mid 90’s. I learned from one of my neighbours, a former engineer that dropped his career to become a professional fashion photographer He had a nice studio, he was very technical and made me learn all the technicalities before I could even take photos. It was not much fun at first as I was a teenager eager to get out and just shoot photos. Well, my first assignment was to read The Zen in the Art of Archery as an analogy to learn when to click the shutter, followed by 'The Zone system' by Ansel Adams and shooting many many photos of the grey card. I recently told this story to a friend and he said, “You learned the Mr. Miyagi way”, I never saw it that way but it’s true haha and I guess it was worth it.

My Father

The more I learned about photography, the more I enjoyed it. Next thing I convinced my father that I needed a darkroom, he was very supportive and I got a full room in our house for my darkroom. My father was a commercial pilot and took me to New York to get all the needed equipment at B&H, lucky me, it was a great experience. I got a nice Beseler enlarger and I was able to develop and print 35mm & 6x6 black and white, it was great! At the time I worked with just one camera, a Nikon FE2 and a few years later I was able to get a nice Hasselblad 501cm, it was a great time.

Something Was Missing

By the early 2000’s digital photography quickly arrived and seduced me, I ended moving to full digital around 2004. It seemed great for a few years, it was practical, fast, easy and convenient but as the years passed I started feeling that something was missing. I missed mixing chemistry, developing, taking the time, the thrill of the anticipation, trusting your skills, having a tangible film that I could keep and archive without the fear of easily loosing it overtime like a digital file.

I tried to convince myself

The itch of film photography was there but I kept it dormant for some time. I tried to convince myself that digital was the only reasonable option, that film was an outdated medium and that there was no reason to go back.

It was meant to be

Until one day in 2017 I got curious and searched online for a 6x17 camera, it was my all time favourite format that I have dreamed of when I was a student. I was curious to see if those cameras were available, and yes, there was a nice Fuji G617 for sale at a decent price locally, it was meant to be! All excited, I decided to contact the seller, we met and I ended up getting the camera. When I got the camera home, I was very excited to give a try. It was a new format to me and I was thrilled to find out how it feels to shoot film again after over a decade!

The 6x17 has a special place

Well, It’s been 7 years since then and my love for film photography just keeps growing. I have a few different cameras in different formats that I enjoy using. One minute I enjoy shooting 35mm, the next I enjoy shooting 4x5 large format or a nice 6x6 square. However, the 6x17 has a special place in my cameras cabinet, it is my favourite format, it is visually pleasing to the eye, it is beautiful. I have tried a few different 6x17 cameras in the last few years and today I use a Linhof Technorama 617s iii , it is great.

It has made me grow as a photographer

In a way my story is similar to my mentor, I went to business school and used to be a 9 to 5 banker that ended up switching careers to become a full time photographer. For the last 13 years I have had a wedding photo/video business. I shoot on digital and it is just ideal, it works for the large demand and fast pace industry. Digital photography is my work, for everything else, I shoot with film and separating it this way is great, it has made me grow as a photographer and makes me enjoy it so much more. Shooting film has given a new life to my photography career and personal projects.

Capturing Skateboarders and BMX Riders

One of my latest projects was using the 6x17 format to capture skateboarding and BMX bikers. I drove by the skate park multiple times and I visualised how nice it would be to capture them with the 6x17, until one day I decided to do it. I knew I was going to need freezing speeds and that is not an easy thing to achieve with the 6x17, it is a big and heavy fully manual zone focus camera. It works at a minimum aperture of ideally f16 or smaller, trying to use it at faster apertures wouldn’t work well as it needs an ND center filter that only works well on those apertures and on top of it it reduces 1.5 - 2 stops of light to compensate for light fall of on the edges. I also needed to use it handheld to be able to move as needed. Lastly the film selection, a fast film, I decided to use Kentmere 400 and pushing it two stops to an exposure index of 1600 aiming to get shutter speeds of 1/125 to 1/500 on a sunny day which is the top speeds of the copal shutters on the wide angle lenses I decided on using, a 72mm and a 90mm.

The shooting was challenging

I went to the park on a sunny day and luckily there was some action going on that day. At the park, I met a couple of French BMX bikers that were enjoying California for a few weeks and gladly did a few tricks for me to capture. I was able to capture another great local biker and a couple of skateboarders. The shooting was challenging, framing the scene, zone focusing, timing the subject entering the frame with the right eye on the viewfinder and the left one on the subject, and finally shooting at the right moment. You also only have 4 exposures per roll of 120. It was a fun day out with the 6x17, I developed the photos with HC-110 at dilution B and scanned them using an Epson v850.

Images ©Carlos López Medrano