Things are slowly moving along in Shanghai lately. The city is becoming more crowded and polluted and I'm being asked to pitch and quote for a few biggish jobs. Each week seems to bring positive signs. For instance, a large park just opened again, not far from where I live in Shanghai’s former French Concession. I think the situation will only really improve when the government re-opens schools and lifts the ban on public events. It’s very hard to make plans for the year in these circumstances, but the wheels are starting to turn.
A few weeks ago I greeted some of the first warm spring weather with some friends at a picnic at the West Bund waterfront. A fellow photographer, Aslan, came along and we both loaned each other cameras that we’d long been curious about from each other’s collection. I lent him an Hasselblad Xpan and he lent me a Fujifilm Professional GA645 with a roll of Kodak Portra 400 already loaded in it.
Most of the photos here are from that first roll. I’m a bit nervous being in possession of this camera since they don’t have a great reputation from longevity and Aslan has only put one roll through it since he bought it. Seeing that his version only shoots 15 frames in a roll of 120 film, it’s one of the very first models. Later modesl will give you 16 frames from a roll of 120 film.
The GA series are unique camera because they are (sort of) pocketable autofocus rangefinder that shoots medium format film in 6x4.5cm frames. The GA645 is the first generation of the line that started in 1995 finished with a zoom version, the GA645Zi, which came out three years later. The GA645 has a semi-wide 60mm f4 lens, which is equivalent to a 35mm lens on 35mm film camera.
I’ve been curious about this camera for a while. Back in Melbourne, I saw the German film director Wim Wenders take a zoom model out of trench coat pocket and shoot a frame of the sunset at Federation Square after a screening go Buena Vista Social Club in around 2002.
An odd thing about this camera is that its default framing is portrait format, so you have to turn the camera 90 degrees, like you would to usually take vertically framed portrait, if you want to shoot in landscape format. This doesn’t really bother me since I find that 6 x 4.5cm really lends itself to vertical portraits.
The viewfinder is nice and bright and it has parallax correction - that is, it adjusts the frame lines if you are close to the subject. You don’t look through the lens on this camera, but through a window on the side, so the framing generally isn’t as accurate as an SLR, which should show you exactly what you’re shooting if the it’s professional level model with 100% viewfinder coverage.
The autofocus seems fairly accurate and it gives you an indicator of the focal distance to tell you if you’ve missed it altogether so you can re-focus. The closest focal distance is 0.7m, so that might be why one of the portraits on my first roll is back focused. I’ve since shot a roll of Fujifilm 160NS and the camera currently has a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in it. I think I’ll swap it back for my Xpan once this roll is done.
I was considering buying one of these cameras when I was shooting a job in Osaka a couple of years ago, but I ended up getting a Pentax 645NII with a 75mm 2.8 lens for not much more than what a mint GA645Zi goes for. In terms of bang for your buck there wasn’t much competition between the two cameras.
Maybe if I find myself in Japan one day with money burning a hole in my pocket, I might get myself one.
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