Saturday, October 29, 2016

Canon EOS IX Advanced Photo System Camera

Alum Creek Reservoir, October 201.  Canon EOS IX, Sigma 15mm fisheye.

Sometime during the first half of 2015, I was cruising around YouTube and found a very intriguing video created by Michael Raso.  First impressions?  Well, I was kinda like "who is THIS guy"!?!?!  Well, after finding and listening to the podcast he created, the Film Photography Project podcast, I have become hooked on film photography.



The "FPP" runs as a film photography collaborative, not only hosting a podcast, but by providing knowledge and expertise to the film shooting community across the globe.  They are constantly accepting donations of cameras that they then send to film photography students just learning about the medium.  It's being part of that community that has endeared me to Michael and his collaborators.



Last fall, I was the lucky winner of an FPP sponsored contest.  The prize?  The mid 1990's Canon EOS IX, an interchangeable lens camera that used Advanced Photo System film.  Designed to be the next big thing, the format quickly died as the century came to a close.  The marketing behind the system stressed three possible print sizes for each frame. The native format, the shape of today's HDTV screens yields a 4x6" print, the C for classic generated a 4x6" print, and P for panorama resulted in a super wide 4x11" print! What I didn't understand until recently is that the "C" and "P" size prints were just taken from crops of the "H" or high definition print. 



Since I wasn't going to be making prints, I shot all images with the intent on showing their final wide or "HD" format.  Loving this extra wide framing, I decided to shoot most of my images with a Sigma 15mm fisheye lens.  My wife and I took our boys out for a fall drive around the Alum Creek Reservoir near Delaware Ohio last fall to give the camera and lens a try.  I was using FUJIFILM Nexia 200, but since it was expired, Michael suggested I shoot the film at 100 iso.  After sitting on the film for an entire year, I wasn't expecting much.  But after processing and scanning by The Darkroom, I'm really impressed with the results.


This may have been Kodak and Fuji's last ditch effort to save film.  In the end, it didn't work, but creating a native format in what would become our standard framing for HD televisions and computer monitors was about 10 years ahead of its time.  I really enjoyed shooting with the Canon EOS IX.  I'm off to go snag more APS film from the FPP store 
-Tom



Monday, January 4, 2016

Snow Squalls



Now this is street photography. Very brief snow squalls rolled in strangely form the northeast across the city today.  The snow was just enough to barely register as a lighter tone on the asphalt surface of Morse Road.

-Tom