An afternoon at the Distillery District - Part 1: The mission

Three different cameras, three different formats, one location, one focal length.  That was the recipe for my shoot at the Distillery District.   

I had decided to go down as I needed to finish some film up in my Leica IIIf and my Fujifilm GA645.  It was also my first real opportunity to spend some quality time behind the medium format opportunity and I was really looking forward to seeing what it was like to use.  To instantly capture the moment I also took my Fujifilm X-100.

The interesting thing was all these three cameras were different formats, but with lenses around 35mm in full frame 135 format language.  The two Fujis have fixed lenses of 23mm and 60mm respectively, while I decided to attach the 35mm Summaron to the Leica.  Not only that, all three were rangefinders that used a different means of figuring out if the camera is in focus through the viewfinder; being a traditional optical rangefinder in the Leica, a digital screen on the X100 and an electronic distance scale in the GA645.

Another interesting point was the age of each of the cameras, being less than a year for the X100, approx 15 years for GA645 and 60 years Leica IIIf.

After persuading my wife to look after our little girl for a couple hours, I made my way downtown and spent a couple of hours wandering around.  Within a compact place there's lots to shoot, and I ended up taking approximately 130 shots, 30 each on the film cameras, and the rest on the X100.

Having one focal length for three cameras was actually beneficial as distance from an object when shooting always stayed constant.  It also gave me a better feel for how each camera worked in practice.