612 Slightly Delayed

Wide of the Mark

I’m continuing my adventures in camera scanning, progressing now to medium format. I started off with a frame that was just lying discarded, still in its plastic sleeve, never scanned. This is from one of my two Linhof 612PC cameras, I think probably the first, as it is clearly shot with the 65mm lens.

Ponte Santa Maria Nova, Venice. Provia 100F, Linhof 612PC, 65mm f/5.6

I didn’t really have a happy relationship with the Linhof 612, despite it being a camera I’d wanted to use for well over a decade before I bought the first one. I was drawn to the camera through the works of one of my earlier influences, New Zealand landscape photographer Andris Apse. He was a great exponent of the Linhof, or more precisely, the 612 format. I originally discovered his work shortly after I started working with the Hasselblad XPan, and immediately felt that the 612 format was often more to my taste than the wider 24 x 65 of the XPan*. Also, the Linhof 612 lenses all have a built-in 6mm positive shift, which can be a huge plus in landscape photography. And the camera body has a tripod socket on top, as well as beneath, so that you can invert it to get a 6mm negative shift.

But the Linhof is a pig to use. The shift thing, for example: it is very useful, but often as not I wanted negative shift, and for whatever reason, it never occurred to the master craftsmen over in Munich to allow the removable viewfinder to also be mounted “under” the camera. The contortions required to frame a negative-shift shot can be truly epic. Of course the camera is completely manual, so there are plenty of things to go wrong, and it will quite happily allow you shoot with the dark slide in, unlike, say a Hasselblad. It is built like a tank, but it weighs like a tank too. However the worst problem I had with both my Linhof bodies was frame spacing, especially overlapping frames. I could never work out why it was happening. I suspect there is some particular way to load the film, but certainly nothing in the manual indicates this. Usually, of course, the good shots suffered frame overlapping, and the failures, from composition, or focus or exposure errors had no frame issues at all.

This could have been quite an interesting shot had I not overexposed it by 2 stops. The framing is correct, naturally, since the shot is rubbish, as per Murphy, but even so, there is some strange stuff going on both to the left and the right.

Of course there are really no current online resources on this camera. It seems to be reserved for collectors these days, not photographers. I did send my original body to Linhof to be checked and serviced, and they did some work on it, replaced some worn parts, but it didn’t solve my problem. So I bought a much newer 612 PCII, but that didn’t help either. Eventually I sold them both to fund my X1DII. However I didn’t just sell them due to these technical issues.

When I did get a good frame, it was spectacular on the light table. But somehow that didn’t really translate to scans. They seemed soft and muted, usually just not worth the effort. Which gets us back to the point.

The above shot isn’t a particular good photo, which is probably why I discarded it. But having now “camera scanned” it, all my moaning about the Linhof is seeming a bit exaggerated. The Kaiser film holder can only accommodate sizes up to 6x9, so I had to scan it in two parts and let Photoshop glue them back together. I used the Kaiser glass inserts to hold the film, so it was perfectly flat. Flatness was probably an issue in the Plastic 120, despite its excellent film holders. The results at 100% zoom are pretty satisying.

100% zoom of a section of the Ponte Santa Maria Nova shot

This is practically Hasselblad X1DII level of resolution and sharpness. Actually I think I got the focus slightly off. The (very expensive) custom Schneider lenses for the Linhof do have an excellent reputation, but up until I have never really worked out to get the best out of them.

So, would I now go back and buy another Linhof 612? No, I very much doubt it. Prices have risen still further, from “eye-watering” to “just stupid”. I’ve no idea who buys them these days. A Horseman 612, while less “sexy”, would be a far better bet, at much less insane prices, especially a model with full tilt-shift. But I certainly plan to revisit my archive.

Hmm. The timestamp when I hit save on the first draft was “6:17”. Is the Universe dropping a hint?

* Actually, “612” format, in terms of actually image area, is really 5.6 x 12. At least with the Linhof film gate. Amazingly, I’ve only just realised that. So the 6 x 12 crop preset I have saved in various applications, and indeed the 2:1 (612) frame that the Hasselblad X1DII gives you, are actually “wrong”.