Some months ago I visited the yearly Peterborough Festival of Antiques. Both never having been before we didn't know what to expect, but I was hoping that I would at least come across a camera or two. The weather wasn't great on the day and as we were walking around, many of the stalls were already packing away. I did happen upon one stall who had a few vintage cameras for sale. One of them caught my eye, the Mamiya C3, but the seller wanted a little more than I had with me. I walked away... but couldn't get it out of my mind. When I passed back around, the stall was almost packed away, but I asked the seller if he would be willing to make a deal. I made my best offer and I became the proud owner of a Mamiya C3 and also my first TLR.

The C3 was produced between 1962 to 1965, being from the 60's the all metal construction is fantastic, no plastic in sight and it feels very solid in the hand. On first glance it is larger than other TLR's like the Rolleiflex and Yashica, but doesn't feel so big that it is uncomfortable to use all day. It is often referred to as a cheaper alternative to the Rolleiflex, but to call it cheap or bad is under selling this series of cameras.

The model I have (pictured above) came with an 80mm f/2.8 lens, being interchangeable sets it apart at this price point and is also a great selling point when most of the competition don't allow you to change lenses.

For my first outing with the camera I decided to go with as I picked it up, is all I did was clean then lens as I just wanted to see if it worked and I got on with the TLR form factor. For my film I chose Ilford HP5, I have not shot this film before, so thought it was a good opportunity to test both. The camera was simple to load especially since my first outing with a medium format camera and wasting 2 rolls of film loading it backwards. The seller did warn me that the camera may need a CLA, but for me the camera worked very smoothly. The bellows rolled in and out without sticking or jitter. The focus screen was very bright, the only thing that was hard to get used to was the ground glass has a Fresnel pattern which I have never used before and took some getting used to. Being a 6x6 format, the film advance is very short compared to the 35mm I a used to shooting and I found myself wondering if I had wound the film on enough, something I may get used to in time, but very disconcerting for my first time out.

The second thing that became apparent was the 6x6 square frame, it makes you approach things very different as there is no landscape or portrait. Looking down into the waist level finder with the image being back to front is something that also takes some getting used to, so I found myself having to take more time to look for more pleasing compositions. Coming from digital where you can rattle off 12 frames in a few seconds, I did feel this was a slower process, but that is one thing I enjoy about film photography and discovering all these great vintage cameras.

To meter the light I used 2 sources, I had my external light meter and I also used an app on my iPhone, just to see if the results matched.

For this film I used a new lab also, as the one I had been using had moved to Canada (as you do). I decided from a recommendation to got with AG Photolab in Birmingham. While they don't offer the level of finishing that UK Film Lab used to offer, there service has one great selling point and for me that is the ability to get your scans back as a .tiff file as opposed to just .jpeg is excellent. The film and prints came back with in a few days, which is most impressive and if I was to offer film commercially would be a real advantage.

When the film came back I had a little surprise. It seems the flap the Mamiya has that you fold up when you change the lens got stuck half way and most of the frames had a black bottom half. It took me a while to work this out

Me and the Mamiya C3