Addendum: Featured Comments to the 'My 6x9 Story' Post

[Republished lest you should miss them. My apologies again; my days got a little out of control for a spell. Here's the original post. —Ed.]

Tex Andrews: "Oh, be still my heart! My favorite film camera of all—the GSW690II. It was with this camera that I started to consistently shoot better, and oddly fell into my current and long time project, going on about 15 years now. To get my current camera that owns my heart, my 645Z, I had to trade in a bunch of gear to get the price down to 'only excruciating.' Almost all of the trade-ins hurt, but this one was by far the one that really made me sad, and does to this day. I'll get another one one day, but when I traded it in it actually felt like a betrayal, that camera had been so good to me. I felt faithless."

John Hufnagel: "If I recall correctly, the Graflex Combat Graphic was the first camera colloquially known as the Texas Leica. It even looks like a Leica."

Tom Duffy: "I really like my Fuji GW690III. The loud 'Ping!' when the leaf shutter goes off is about as un-Leica as you can get. 23 years ago, I brought it with me to Disney World on a family vacation and shot many rolls of Kodak 400 speed color negative film in 220 format. I came back with a large number of good pictures. My hit rate was actually way higher than my average. I've heard it described as 'everyone's second favorite camera.' Except yours, evidently.  :-) "

Steve C: "I watch Joel Meyrowitz's Masters of Photography course (which is excellent by the way), and he walks around shooting in the street looking like a seven-foot-tall Star Wars villain and nobody seems to notice. Ashley Gilbertson is the same, looking like a rock'n'roll guitar tech or perm'd biker, but gets the most incredible, up close, essence of humanity pictures."

Mike replies: Yeah, I really think it's a matter of personality and social adeptness. It's what you project to other people. And how you feel about yourself.

s.wolters: "It’s not only the camera, it’s the camera in combination with you. With my Pentax 67 I had the same kind of experience as you had with that Texas Leica. With my Rolleiflex people always reacted positively and sometimes tried to make contact or even wanted to pose.

"I envy some female photographers. A few months ago I was at a tourist hotspot where fifty people tried to photograph an overwhelming landscape with their smartphone in vertical mode. Only three or four had a proper camera. One of them, a pretty girl with very short pants and very long legs drew all the attention. Her rucksack full of equipment would have made any paparazzo jealous. As it happens when traveling around I also saw her at some other places. Because of her appearance she always made contact with anyone within minutes, using her bulky Canon 7D combination as a conversation piece. A Texas Leica would probably worked for her as well, but a phone camera or point and shoot not because those aren’t special enough to start a chat. One of the reasons I’m using Micro 4/3 is that think I look rather harmless with it. With a FF DSLR I feel that one day I will get lynched by an angry mob."

Robert: "I have almost the exact opposite experience. I‘ve taken thousands of pictures of strangers and hardly any of them have bothered to look. Most were taken with Leica rangefinders rather than a Texas Leica, admittedly, but many were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24–105mm on it, some even with a Rolleiflex. I remember one day in London where even when getting very close no one seemed to be bothered, and another in a small town in Germany, and the same thing. Same with all over Asia, except there people often do look then smile widely after the picture is taken. I am not usually furtive. So maybe it's the U.S.—I've never shot there."

Ilkka: "Maybe the problem was that you thought of it as Texas Leica instead of New York Linhof. A big handheld camera instead of a more convenient and faster 4x5 replacement."

John Krumm: "I have similar results shooting strangers, at least in the Midwest. Here in Duluth people see you coming from a mile off. They don't usually think you are actually taking a photo of them. What usually happens is they stop walking or even stop their car so that you can take your shot without them in the way. Nowadays I pretty much never see anyone else with a camera around the neck. I'm the only weirdo in a town of 85,000 who does that, it seems (I know there are a few others, just not when I am out and about). That's why so many of my people shots are from a distance...."

Hugh: "It’s a person thing, not a camera thing. Not a criticism really. I never had any problem doing street photography with a Pentax 67. Same size, much more noise. Speed, confidence, and a friendly smile when people notice."

Stan B.: "Come to think of it, Tod Papageorge did some exemplary B&W street with it...."

Mike replies: He certainly did.

David L.: "Regardless of the comments, putting a 6x7 or 6x9 negative in an enlarger and printing it on fiber-base paper is a sublime experience. I had Fuji 6x7 and 6x9 cameras and regret letting them go."

Martin D: "I loved l, loved, loved that camera. Had both the 90mm and the 65mm 6x9 versions. For me, the very size and monstrosity of the thing made me invisible, like wearing a hi-viz jacket and helmet—people just took me for someone from a different world and ignored me. This is the camera to take Walker Evans-style shots of everyday life. I used Agfa Scala B&W transparency film—wow, how those massive transparencies came to life on the lightbox. Took the best portrait of my father with it. One roll of 120 only gives eight shots, I metered carefully and used only one shot for my father, it was perfect. Boy, I miss this camera."

Mike replies: Did you know that film was just plain old Agfa APX 100 with reversal processing? True.

Eric Brody: "The closest I ever came to the 'Texas Leica' was the Mamiya 7II, a fabulous lightweight rangefinder with some of the sharpest lenses I've ever used, and I've used a lot of lenses. Even though each lens had its own, almost silent, leaf shutter, I never used it for people, so I never got to scare anyone. What interests me about this conversation is how people seem to sort to two groups, those with the 'courage' to do street work and those, like me, who are irrationally afraid of it."

Mike

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Comments

[Peter Williams]

You say, "plain old Agfa APX 100", but for me, Agfapan 100 and 400 in combination with Agfa Rodinal were the magic combination for tonality and a look I loved. (HP5 in Rodinal was also a thing of beauty.)

[Yes, I loved Agfapan 100 in Rodinal. Made for each other. Although, curiously, not very fine-grained for a 100-speed film. Wish I had done more with it, now that it's gone. --Mike]

[Thomas Mc Cann]

There once was a lens attachment that changed the field of view 90 degrees which when used horizontally allowed easy candid, if sneaky, shots.

[L. Young]

Scala was a variant of APX 100 coated at the required (higher than neg film) silver/m² for it to deliver the desired reversal characteristics, not just 'plain old Agfapan' - all the nonsense about 'silver rich' becomes rather obvious when you realise that transparency films are coated at a silver/ m² rate several times that used in B&W paper (which has varied little since at least the 1940s).

[We'll have to disagree about this. I was Editor of Photo Techniques magazine at the time, and Phil Davis, Professor Emeritus of Photography at the University of Michigan and the author of Beyond the Zone System, performed sensitometric tests on Scala and APX 100 which proved they were identical. When presented with the evidence, our contacts at Agfa reluctantly admitted it was true. At any rate it doesn't much matter now. --Mike]

[Martin D]

Interesting connection to APX100. I always was a "naive" user of Agfa Scala, working straight with it as it was and leaving the rest to the lab. It sure was expensive, but I never took more than a handful of shots in any one outing, so cost was ok.

Without the massive size of the raw material from the Fuji, I probably would have stuck to a negative-positive workflow, but those 6x9 positives where just so utterly gorgeous on the lightbox, I followed this route purely for the visual pleasure of those moments.

And on taking stock of the output, it seems to me that I never produced as many keepers as with the Fuji GW690 and (carefully metered) Scala. Subconsciously I think I still try to expose the same way with my digital Fuji, and then postprocess accordingly.