Brought my Speed Graphic and a 6x7 back along on a nice bicycle ride over the weekend. This was my first attempt at using the Speed Graphic in the field, so I unfortunately screwed up the all-important "set focus, darkslide out, trip shutter, darkslide in, wind shutter, advance film" sequence a couple times and lost a couple photos; three out of nineteen shots were completely unusable and a good half of them aren't what they could be.

Also, I definitely should have used an orange filter. It was a hazy day, and most of these have been edited pretty aggressively to pull out any kind of sky contrast. Good chance I go back out along a similar route next weekend and try again.

Nevertheless, I'm quite happy with these for my first serious B&W shoot in a while. I've been using my "photo time" for a lot of repair projects recently (mainly a Leica IIIc and the Coolscan 8000 that scanned these rolls; more on both later, hopefully), so it was nice to get back out and focus on actually using the cameras. The Speed Graphic is surprisingly nice for cycling with, since it's small enough to fit in a backpack and pretty light (my EOS 1N RS with the 24-105 is both heavier and bulkier, and that one shoots 35mm), and since I was mostly going by Sunny 16 (1/250 ƒ/11, specifically, for most of these) and focusing at infinity I only really had to concern myself with composition.

Now that I finally have a good way to scan 120 film at high resolution, I'm having a lot of fun with it. I've basically got a 75 year old camera that can shoot a hundred megapixels (6x7cm is about 95 MP, and 6x9cm is closer to 130, but I prefer the slightly smaller format). I suspect a RB67 is in my future.