The Fuji GA645 Pro is a lovely "point and shoot" medium format film camera that is quick and easy to use. And the Bellini C41 developing kit is good too - but you need to develop a lot of film to get good value from it.
Too Heavy, or Too Slow.
Although I love film, I also use Fuji digital cameras, mainly for landscape photography. A year or so B.C. (Before Covid) I booked a week long workshop on the Scottish island of Harris and Lewis. The workshop was run by Lizzie Shepherd and Alex Hare, brilliant landscape photographers working together as Tripod Travels. They are empowering teachers with complementary styles and are good company. After several postponements the workshop finally happened in October 2021. Although I was mainly going to shoot digital images I wanted to take a film camera too, but which one? My Mamiya C330f was too big and heavy to carry far, especially when I already had a heavy tripod and a bag with two digital bodies and four lenses to lug. The Nettar is small and light, but too slow, requiring use of a separate exposure meter and rangefinder. I love slow photography but I wanted my film camera to be for "quick grabs". Neither seemed suitable for this particular adventure.
G.A.S.
So I did what any self-respecting Gear Acquisition Syndrome victim would do, I watched many YouTube reviews and bought another camera from eBay. I settled on a Fuji GA645 because it's medium format, not too heavy, has an excellent lens and is quick to use. It is a medium format "point and shoot" with auto focus and auto exposure! I ran a quick test roll of Delta 400 through it as soon as it arrived and, happy with the results, I packed it for the trip to Scotland, along with half a dozen rolls of Portra 400.
Harris and Lewis - an adventure
I travelled to Harris and Lewis by car, with a friend from Whitstable Photographic Group. We took two days to drive 700 miles to the Isle of Skye, at the height of the petrol shortage!
We stayed at the Old Inn, Carbost on the Isle of Skye and can recommend it. A lovely inn with open fires, local ales and good food. Accommodation is basic but warm and comfortable. The next day, after taking a few photos around Carbost we put the car on the ferry to Harris and Lewis and met the other workshop participants.
I very much enjoyed taking pictures with the GA645 during the photography workshop, often grabbing some micro-landscapes or shots of the other photographers whilst my digital camera was making images with v e r y l o n g exposures. The 1990's auto-focus is slow and noisy, but for the sort of photography I was doing, it was fine. Although you can set the exposure and focus manually, the lack of dedicated controls makes it very fiddly and I think it goes against the "point and shoot" ethos of the camera, I just put it on Program mode and let it get on with it.
Trouble Develops
When I returned home I processed the first two rolls of film in some Bellini C41 chemistry I had in stock. This is a great kit, easy to use and you can process 14 or so films in the kit before it is expired. I had only processed a couple but... when I took the film off the spirals it was clear the developer had expired whilst stored in my garage for two months since I last processed colour film. The shots were pretty much unusable. So I ordered a new bottle of developer and processed the next two rolls. These came out much better, but with magenta tones at the edges of the scanned images. I had noticed this before when shooting Fuji Pro 400H, but it seemed more noticeable with Portra 400. I contacted the ever-helpful Nik & Trick from whom I get my film and chemicals and they knew what the problem was. The instructions tell you to agitate for 5 seconds every minute for each step of the process. The bleach step only takes 45 seconds so the films only get one agitation in the bleach if you follow the instructions and it isn't enough. They suggested continuous agitation during the bleaching but warned me this makes pressure build inside the tank and if you aren't careful. the lid can blow off showering you in hot bleach! Undaunted I gave it a go for the last two rolls and finally got some results I'm really happy with. People who came on the photography workshop have commented that the film images really are totally different in character from anything they took, and it was certainly a lot of fun. But I'm not sure I'm going to continue developing my own colour film. It's not difficult and now I've mastered it, the results are good. But you need to be processing at least two rolls a week to get good value from the kit, or it expires of old age before it's developed the number of films it should.
