it took me a little while to realize that the viewfinder on the widelux f7 is only accurate at infinity. i was wondering why my closer-up shots were misframed. duh, the thing is just a simple fixed lens on top of the body.

so my last few rolls through the widelux have been studies of two concepts at once. first, framing. with the widelux, you aim lower the closer the subject is. i’m still getting used to it but as you can see, it’s not impossible at all. one thing i am trying to do is, as i look through the viewfinder i imagine i am looking all the way to inifinity. i’m using that to help me readjust where i point the camera to hopefully frame the image to something closer resembling what i was viewing initially through the viewfinder.

the second study, shooting moving subjects. the widelux has no proper shutter, it is just a vertical slot that opens as the lens turret begins its rotation which pans the film. so i’m not sure how it really shows motion on the film. there are basically three rotation speeds, “1/15″ “1/125″ and “1/250″. these approximate shutter speeds. the above shot was taken at “1/125″, so you can see that motion is not really stopped because the film is exposed sequentially from one side to the other. i should push one more stop so i can shoot more at “1/250″ to see how that works out.

always a process.

boarding bart at the 16th and mission station.

yesterday i was shooting in the 24th/mission station when a guy and his buddy asked about my camera. he seemed to know a thing or two about film and cameras, but had never seen a swing-lens panorama before. from a distance, he thought it was a stereo camera. i love san francisco!

from my first roll of color film in the widelux f7. i’m loving this camera more every week. this was the 1/15 speed, which is a bit of a misnomer since the camera doesn’t have a regular shutter. it’s also said that ektar is “easy to scan,” but this is the first frame that i’ve considered easy. i just scanned on auto, resize, and posted. not bad, huh?

ektar 100, widelux f7.

this is the stairs/escalator at church street station, on san francisco’s underground muni system. the escalator has been broken for what seems like weeks now. this is where i ascend to reach photoworks.

kodak tri-x 400 rated at iso 1600. shot with a widelux f7.

staring out the window from vesuvio, a bar in north beach, san francisco. this was the night i took the chinatown at night shot.

fuji pro800z, shot at iso 1600. pentax 6×7, 90/2.8mm.

i recently went out shooting with a large group of flickr friends in northbeach/chinatown. i mainly shot with my pentax 6×7 using the 2.8/90 lens and fuji 800z pushed a stop and a half.

but as a second camera i brought my widelux f7. so far, every time i bring it into a new situation it turns our wonderful images like the one above.

photographers always joke that it’s not about the camera at all but the operator who is creating the images. the widelux is like one of the many niche cameras that existed. but it has a unique signature in the images it captures, something that doesn’t really seem to come from the photographer. it challenges the notion in that joke.

widelux f7, kodak tri-x 400 at iso 1600. rodinal 1+50 for 22 minutes.