What to do with a 6x6 camera?

I have a Yashica 635 TLR which used to belong to my grandfather. I’ve mostly figured out how to use it, but I’m not sure what to use it for.

I’m told 6x6 cameras are most often used for B&W work, but I have no access to a darkroom. Medium-format slide projectors are very expensive too. Is there anything else this camera can do better than a SLR or digital?

Take pictures with it!

You can use black and white or color film. To make prints, though, you will need access to a photo lab or darkroom. The huge surface area of the 6x6 format will give you quality far beyond anything that can be done with 35mm or a digital costing less than $10,000. Of course, if you’re not a photo buff or just want vacation snapshots, it isn’t worth the trouble.

I have had a lot of fun recently scanning some old 6x4.5 chromes with a high-res film scanner.

You can usually pick up cheap 35mm conversion kits for the camera, so photo nephew tells me. He says they originally came with one in a leather case. He says the manual for it is here good luck.

Thanks - I’ll look into the 35mm conversion.

But I guess I was mainly interested in whether there is a way to use medium format film to get affordable output which I have complete control over. I hate getting color prints in a lab because I have no control over the output.

friedo, what kind of scanner do/did you have access too? And how good a scanner, combined with 6x6 film, do I need to surpass the quality of my digital camera (a 6-megapixel digital SLR)?

I have a Nikon Super Coolscan which is specially made to scan 120/220 film. That set me back about a thousand bucks (got a refurb from eBay.)

However, film can be scanned very well on a plain flatbed scanner with a transparency attachment. I have found that with a good medium format negative, you can get really spectacular results on a 5000+ DPI scanner, which you can get for a few hundred bucks.

If you have the interest, you can throw together the rudiments of a B/W darkroom for not much money. Particularly if you’re willing to scan negatives directly into the computer without making paper prints. It wouldn’t cost much to get your feet wet and see if you enjoy the hobby.

I wouldn’t buy a film scanner right away. If you own a cheapo flatbed scanner with transparency adaptor, it will give you a decent scan–enough to see if you like a picture, anyway. You can always rescan negatives at higher quality later.

A good film scanner would cost $600-1,000 new. The old Polaroid I used to use would do 1900 dpi; they’ve improved a bit since then. I can only hope they’ve gotten faster. I see used scanners on ebay for $50 or so; I don’t know if they are worth buying. I don’t know how they hold up over time, and you’d probabl have to deal with a SCSI connection for the older ones.

You can take excellent color pictures with a 6x6. More people shoot B/W probably because it’s easier and cheaper to develop at home. The less you spend on processing, the more you can blow on film. (I know I’m generalizing here, and discounting all the photographers who prefer the look of B/W–or specific types of B/W film.)

One of my favorite photography sites is photo.net. It’s worth a look, particularly to see the essay on medium-format cameras.

You can shoot color film with it, you’ll just have to mail it off to a big lab for processing (or most big cities have a professional lab or two that you could go to; ask at the store where you buy the film [around here, at least, only photo stores sell 120 film]). It’ll cost a bit more than 35mm, but it’s worth it if you want big (8x10 is where you can really start to see the difference) prints.

You can develop B&W film yourself at home; about $50 worth of equipment and $30 in chemicals (you can do 50 rolls or so per batch of chemicals). I make my own prints, but you probably don’t want to get into that – enlargers are expensive. Probably better to just scan the negatives.

The 635, as somebody’s already mentioned, is designed to take an adapter to make vertical pictures on 35mm film. I’ve seen a few of the adapters on ebay.

What lenses does it have? (Yashinons are very good; the earlier Yashikor, not so great. The 635 was made during the changeover period, so it could’ve had either.)

If you have any questions about the operation of it, email me. I have a Yashica TLR too – mine’s a later 120-only model, but I read up on all of them before I bought it.

Upon further consideration, you really do have to make your own prints – TLRs in general and especially Yashicas have a big problem with parallax, corrected by only having 86% coverage in the viewfinder, thereby forcing you to frame wide and crop it when you print it. TLRs aren’t good if you want slides to be projected.

Most pro labs, however, would give you a contact sheet (prints the size of the negatives), then you’d draw lines on those to show how you wanted them cropped and order real prints. That’s expensive, though – it’d probably be cheaper for a hobbyist to scan the negs and print them from a home computer or digital-photo-printing kiosk.

Thanks for the information. I’ll look into buying a decent scanner, and either get a B&W developing setup or just get reversal film developed by a lab.

It has a Yashinon lens, by the way. Nice to know it’s a good lens!

By the way, your local college or community college probably has a darkroom; you could call the photography dept. and ask about using that if setting up one of your own is unfeasible.

(Is “unfeasible” a word? It looks funny.)

You could give it to me.

I’ll give you a buck. :slight_smile:

I think you’re looking for infeasible.

I second the recco on photo.net. That place is the bee’s knees.

The Yashica TLRs are exceptional cameras. I used several over the years before working my way up to the Hasselblad.

If you aren’t into getting a darkroom together you can easily scan the medium format film on a flatbed scanner. I’ve done it and I was happy with the results. It’s not even necessary to go to 5000 dpi. I did it at 2400 and everything turned out very well.

If you eventually decide you don’t want to work with it, you can probably get a decent amount for it on ebay too. Those cameras are still popular, particularly for students or beginners in medium format.