Have yourselves a great weekend good people, and if you’re going to the beach, be sure to bring that camera along, but take care because the sand and water are camera killers! Anyway, take your best shots because these are the memories your family will return to again and again. But what’s “better” really comes down to personal preferences. Did it give me images with that 80mm f/2 Zeiss and Kodak film look? No, no it didn’t. Did it give me technically better, sharper, less grainy pictures? Yes, yes indeed. This year I took an Olympus OM-D EM5 with me. This also marked the last time I took such a big bulky camera to the beach and the last time took such a camera so close to the water. It was a great camera/lens combo and I do miss it! Still, the lens I think provided a distinctive look and good exposure. The Sun was shining down brightly and while I normally aim for a fast aperture for shallow depth of field in portraits, I think I stopped down the 80mm f/2 Planar to maybe f/2.8 or f/3.5 and still got the top shutter speed of 1/4000 on the Contax 645 in AV mode. Having used mostly 35mm SLRs the last 20 years. The lenses we used were the 35mm, 80mm and 120mm Macro (thanks to our friends at Keeble & Shuchat Photography ). Now we could use for the first time latest Kodak ProBack 645C on a Contax 645. I realize these will be my kids’ memory of summers past when they are grown, so I always bring some kind of camera with me, even if my iPhone will do most of the time. This short review took a long time to happen as we started investigating into the Kodak Proback in April.
The kids enjoy the beach, the pool, and the boardwalk. While I wouldn’t consider it very exciting for singles looking for a hookup, the Jersey Shore makes a quiet and relaxing getaway. The beaches are generally clean and the towns are usually family friendly. In my Contax 645 review I stated that I would be uploading pics from the camera if I found them, so here’s one from 2012 when I still had the camera.Īs with most American families, we typically start our summers on Memorial Day Weekend, which is considered the unofficial start of the summer season here.įor a quick getaway, we travel a few hours to the Jersey Shore. Contax 645, 80mm f/2 Zeiss Planar, Kodak Portra 400.
It was an ambitious foray in the professional portrait and wedding world where medium format was king (at the time) and competed against the likes of the Pentax 645N and. Baby Z playing in the water off the beach in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey. If you need a quick refresher, the Contax 645 is a 6×4.5cm medium format, autofocus film camera introduced by Kyocera under the Contax brand on February 20th, 1999 in Japan.