The Old Granary - Intrepid 4x5 Black Edition, Ilford Delta 100

In 2001 the Pentax 67ii arrived in my life and it changed my photography forever. It was a huge step up from 35mm film. Heavy, cumbersome, the aspect ratio was so difficult to get used to, I had to lug a heavy tripod around and it was as noisy as a shot gun but over the years it’s proved itself as one of the most capable cameras out there on the market and one which in 2021 is highly sought after.

Spending time with this beast had me seeing pictures differently, it introduced me to negative space and enabled me to use different formats well before digital cameras had this built in to them. I found a love of the square format, the 3x1 panoramic format and got to grips with the normal 10x8 shape of the 67ii pictures.

I very nearly sold the camera 3 or 4 times as the world moved to digital but I just couldn’t part with it. My Pentax 67ii sees the world the way I do or may be it’s the other way around. As my photography changed in nature again, moving away from traditional wide angle landscape shots and garden photography both with large depth of field to a more conversational style and often a very shallow depth of field, the 67ii was there with its amazing 105mm f2.4 lens and my new direction was born.

The Pentax 67ii film area is 4 times the size of a 35mm frame or a full frame digital sensor, which provides greater detail and much smoother tones. The downside is that I only get 10 shots on a roll of 120 film.

Since I bought the Pentax, digital has taken over and film photography faded away but it's recently made somewhat of a comeback. Over that time I’ve owned many other cameras from Nikon SLRs, a bunch of DSLRs, a little Fuji X100f and a Rolleiflex with the legendary Planar f2.8 lens. But there’s always been an itch that needed scratching, a fascination that draws me, a challenge that’s been calling me more forcibly of late.

In late 2020 I sold my Rolleiflex to face up to this challenge, the challenge of large format photography and in January 2021 my Intrepid 4x5 MK IV Black Edition arrived from Brighton. Yep a brand new large format camera manufactured in England. I was looking for a lightweight large format camera that I could carry easily and something I could dip my toe in the water with, test myself with it, see whether I could put this alongside my faithful Pentax 67ii and enjoy making images in a new way.

Fully kitted out with the Intrepid, a Nikkor-W 150mm lens (equivalent to a 50mm lens on 35mm format) and a couple of double film holders, I tentatively setup my first shot in a place known to me so well that I didn't need concentrate on the composition, instead focusing on the camera.

Surprisingly the operation felt quite natural, the years of shooting film and metering manually are just second nature, and before long I had a shot in focus on the back of the camera. Oddly the image being upside down and back to front was easy to come to terms with, after all it is actually just rotated by 180 degrees. Shutter closed, aperture and shutter speed set, film holder loaded and dark slide removed, shutter cocked and click, quietly the first shot was taken.

Dark slide replaced and the double film holder switched to the second frame. I ventured in to new territory for the second shot by raising the front standard to keep the Old Granary from topping over backwards.

So there we have it. The first two large format images captured, no hiccups, no rooky mistakes and I feel very excited to see the results. All I have to do now is to develop and scan the two sheets of film, another new experience.

I heard about New55 peel apart film a couple of years ago. It's a polaroid type film that creates both an instant print and a film negative both of which have a very definite character to them and although the affects are much copied by many digital filters, there's nothing quite like the variability of light and a chemical process. It was only available in 4x5 and having found a bargain of a Polaroid film holder and some expired New55 on eBay, I just had to try it out. I love the result and I’m sure I’ll be shooting this film more.

My Pentax 67ii is a big camera but the Intrepid is a really big camera. The film area is around 15 times the size of a 35mm full frame camera and it’s far slower to shoot than my Pentax, infinitely slower than digital. Handling the film and developing the negatives is difficult and there is so much that can go wrong. So far I’m really enjoying it but the real test will come when I start shooting subjects that aren’t so familiar, that really need me to experiment with the composition and only time will tell whether I’m up to the challenge of the Intrepid!

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