The Bronica ETRS is sold. By the time I sat down to write this, it was packaged up ready to ship to its new owner in Australia, where the light is presumably better than mine.
It has been a 12 months. The short version is that I have spent most of the last year running out of money, which is a process I would not recommend if you have the option. The longer version is nobody’s business. The relevant version, for this article, is that a 645 medium format camera sitting on a shelf is £400 of food for the children, and the children need to eat, so the camera has to go. I have sold a lot of cameras already. This one was nearly the last because I love it. But £400 is £400.
Before it went, I wanted one last shoot with it. That seemed appropriate.
What the ETRS has been to me
The Bronica ETRS is one of those cameras I would describe as bulletproof. A workhorse medium format SLR, mechanically simple, never temperamental, never failed me in any of the conditions I have asked it to work in. The most recent of those was the cold-weather bird-watching shoot in Canada, which was a fiasco in every respect except the camera, which performed exactly as expected while everything else (including me) struggled.
There are cameras I have owned that have produced more striking images. There are none that have been more reliable. Over the years I have come to associate the ETRS with the trips and shoots where I needed the camera to disappear and let me get on with the photograph, and it always did.
So one last roll. Two, as it turned out.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Bronica ETRS on the bench, packed and ready to ship]
The shoot
I decided to do self-portraits in my garage studio. The setting felt right because, as I said in the video, the garage looks more or less how the inside of my head looks at the moment. It is chaos. The ULF portrait box camera I built last year is in there taking up most of the floor space. There are bits of cameras everywhere. Mirrors against the back wall. One light. Plenty of stuff to put between me and the lens.
I loaded a roll of Kentmere 200 first, which was not my first choice (it can be a bit contrasty for a scene with this much visual noise) but I have a lot of it and I am not buying new film right now. I metered with the Reveni Labs Lumo. The Sekonic L-858D went a few weeks ago. The Lumo is a perfectly good little meter and at its price it is one of the genuinely good things in current film photography.
Standard 75mm lens to start with, focused on roughly where my eyes were going to be when I sat in front of the camera, f-stop set for shallow depth so the chaos behind me would soften. Self-timer. Pose. Wait. Click. Repeat.
Then I switched to the 40mm, which puts a lot more of the room in the frame. I had also had a 150mm but that went a few weeks ago too. The 250mm is still here but it was the wrong tool for what I wanted today.
The second roll, surprisingly, was not FP4. I always have FP4. For the first time in years apparently I do not, which is its own small sign of the times. I had a roll of Lomography Potsdam 100, which has more balanced midtones than the Kentmere, so I shot that one to round out the session.
![PLACEHOLDER: a wider self-portrait on the 40mm Bronica lens, showing the garage chaos around me]
The frames I came back to
I did not follow my plan. That is so unlike me, as the description on the video put it, that it is essentially a joke at my own expense.
The plan was to do clean considered portraits at a sensible distance. The actual shoot saw me get closer and closer to the camera as I went, ignoring my own setup. Whenever I do portraits, of anyone, I want to get closer. Apparently I do this to myself as well.
The frames I liked most when I developed the rolls were:
- The feet-up pose, which was a goof at the time and turned into the best-composed frame from the Kentmere roll
- The hood pulled over my face, putting it in deep shadow, which I took on a whim near the end of the second roll
- A similar frame with my hand partially obscuring my face, taken a moment before the hood shot
There is a thread there that I do not want to interpret too hard. They are also just better photographs than the conventional ones I started with.
![PLACEHOLDER: the hood-in-shadow self-portrait, the favourite from the session]
A small footnote on the Instax thing
While I was packing the camera, I remembered. Some of you may have signed up for the Jolly Look Instax Mini back for the Bronica ETRS. It is a back from a company in Canada that lets you shoot Instax film through your ETRS. I had pre-ordered one. It has been delayed repeatedly.
It is due to arrive after my ETRS has shipped to Australia.
I am going to have to ask Jolly Look very nicely if I can have my money back, or if they have a buyer in Australia they want to send mine to.
What is left, and what is next
The cameras still here are the Rolleiflex SLX, a couple of Instax bodies, the Bronica S2A (no plans to sell that, before anyone asks. The S2A has earned its keep through the underdog appeal I wrote about in the Hasselblad piece) and the ULF box camera which is too big to ship and too odd to sell.
The Rolleiflex SLX is next on the chopping block, which is going to be its own video and its own goodbye. Simon Forster has been doing some really clever work with filter mounts for it that I want to cover before it goes, so there is something interesting to point at when it does.
After that, I am working my way back up the frame sizes until I am back at the monster box camera, which by then will be the only camera left.
So that is the ETRS
To the buyer in Australia: it is a great camera. Treat it well. The 75mm lens has been my standard for years and it is genuinely lovely. The body has been used but not abused.
To everyone watching the channel and reading this site, thank you for being there during the gap. I am back. There is plenty more coming. Not weekly, but every two weeks is what I am aiming for, and I have several videos already filmed.
Onwards.