I got a used Mamiya RZ67 Pro II at the end of 2020 as a gift to myself for the hard working of 2020.

I burned through the first roll of Portra 400 really quickly the day I received the camera, but I failed to load the roll onto the reel before developing – I successfully loaded the back paper onto the reel… I guess this was the lesson I had to learn.

Later in the day, I burned through the second roll even quicker to make sure I have the camera tested and here is the not so satisfying result:

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These were all shot hand held the rather bulky camera, so I bet I did not utilize the full potential of the 6×7 cm format. On the other hand, I have only a full frame DSLR for scanning, so it might not matter how much information the film captured.

Either way, image quality is definitely higher, but not to the extend that it exceeds my D800 or even my M10.

Color was harder to adjust out door against the sky, due to the high dynamic range – at the end of day, the sad reality is that even the expensive Portra 400 has narrower dynamic range compared to digital sensors.

This makes me think why film at all?

The struggling lets me appreciate how well modern digital cameras perform in all difficult situations

These situations are high dynamic range, low light and hand held shooting. I learned what part of the process was “bought” by money and what part of the process was truly my own work.

• High dynamic range sensors makes it easy to get acceptable exposure despite that it may seem off on the camera screen: you can pull lots out in post processing. This is not saying we want to be careless on the exposure, but it tells us if we want “acceptable” results, camera auto exposure is normally way smarter than us human.
• Low light capability really makes me rethink what max aperture I really need: with ISO 3200 or even ISO 6400 on my decade old D800 producing good results, there seems not any good reason for anything bigger than f/2.0 – especially in the context of city traveling and nature landscape. My previous stubborn insist on large aperture prime lenses seems ridiculous, but it did teach me what focal lengths are my favorite. I don’t regret my decisions. Though I do need to rethink whether a 24-70 at f/2.8 is really what I need when I upgrade my D800 to a mirrorless system.
• Hand held shooting is golden: not matter how light they are, tripods are always a burden and they reduce the chance a photo is even produced because of the inconvenience. Tripods are useful when you know exactly when and where you want to shoot at what. For city travels, it’s simply useless.

It lets me slow down to really think about critical settings on the camera

Whatever the digital camera allows me to do in the past years without careful thinking is actually what matters for high quality photos.

However much information you can recover from an underexposed photo, it is just not as good as a correctly exposed photo when you really enlarge the photo.

Tripods really work when you just don’t have enough light and the noise from ISO 6400 is not tolerable.

The unforgiveness from the film (compared to digital) really forces the correct thinking process before I press the shutter rlease.

The film look

It may sound stupid, but the film look from real films is just better than any simulated film filters. I know people may argue that the film look is really the result of bad color balancing.

My argument is that you cannot replace the fun of driving an imperfect manual shift car by a faster and better automatic gearbox. Faster is not the goal for us amateur drivers. Getting faster through hard working is the goal – that sense of achievement.

For film, improving the imperfect color balancing through practice is the goal – you develop the sensitivity of subtle color differences and the real understanding of how color works.