The mountains were the easy part. The hard part, for me, is always cities. I am not a great landscape photographer. I find pretty things harder to make interesting than grubby things. So when Part 1 of this review ended on a wide white snow bowl in the Chugach and I admitted I had not fallen for the camera yet, the next outing was always going to matter more. The Fuji needed to win me over somewhere I actually liked photographing. Downtown Anchorage in late March, then. A roll of Ilford Delta 100 in the back. A roll of Kodak Ektar 100 in the bag.
Anchorage at its least finest hour
The locals, or so I am told, refer to this part of the year as Alaska’s least finest hour. The pristine white snow of winter has started to melt. The bright greens and blues of summer are still weeks away. What you get in between is grubby brown snow that has been gritted down for traction over the winter and is now slowly emerging from beneath the ice and slush as the temperature creeps up.
Some people find it ugly. I think it gives the place a bit of edge. From a photography point of view it is much better light to work in than the relentless white of a bright snowy day, which is more or less impossible to expose for interestingly. You point a meter at white snow and the number tells you to take a photo of white snow. That is fine for one frame. Less fine across a roll.
This was, in other words, exactly the kind of light I had hoped for when I planned the second outing.
A black and white day with the Delta 100
Downtown started predictable. There is only so much you can do with a regular grid of shop fronts in the afternoon when half of them are still flagging the end of winter. But I worked my way down toward the docks and found a footbridge over a creek with the water mostly still locked in ice. From the bridge there were good lines and good contrast, which is what Delta 100 wants.
The Fuji loads cleanly and advances without complaint. After the loose feel of the Bronica back, that is a relief. I worked through the roll under the bridge and then walked back up through the streets toward the colour side of town.
There was a moment somewhere mid-roll when I caught myself thinking this is the easiest medium format camera I have ever used to actually take photos with. The 6x9 negative is enormous. The rangefinder is bright and the shutter is so quiet you can take pictures of people without being noticed, which is rare for a camera of this size. Frame, focus, then expose and advance. It is straightforward in a way that bigger 6x9 cameras really are not.
Eight frames go quickly. You always think you’ll get more out of 6x9 than you do.
Standing on the bridge listening to the creek beneath you, which is frozen solid most of the way through and ticks quietly as it shifts, is its own quiet pleasure. There are moments on a film camera, especially a big slow one, where you find yourself standing somewhere for ten minutes because the camera does not allow rushing. The Fuji is in that family. You frame and check the meter. You adjust if you need to. The shutter is cocked separately to the release and that small extra moment between the two slows you further. The pace is the pace and you fall into it.
Ektar, when you wanted black and white
Out came the Delta, in went the Ektar. This is the moment where I had to give myself a small talking-to. There is a thing where you wake up in the morning and the world looks like a colour film day, and another where the world looks like a black and white day. This was a black and white day. I had only brought the one roll of B&W. So colour it was. Annoying.
I walked further down into a more industrial part of downtown. There were potholes in the road and reflections in the puddles where the snowmelt was collecting. Exactly the sort of grimy you cannot pose for, and very much my cup of tea. The Ektar is unforgiving in some ways. It does not flatter the way Portra does, and it pushes contrast and saturation if it gets any colour at all. But on a grey day it just gives you accurate grey, which felt about right.
Then somewhere along one of those side streets I found the only colour in town. A Thai food caravan parked on its own, painted in bright purple and yellow against acres of grey concrete and grubby snow. I shot the eighth and final frame of the Ektar on it. Sometimes you go a whole afternoon looking for one frame and then it just appears.
A brief word about trains
A goods train clattered past on the line behind the caravan as I was changing film. Some of you will hear “goods train in Alaska” and start reaching for the comments. I have to be honest. I do not get trains. I have never understood the appeal. They are clearly very useful for moving things from A to B in large quantities and I can see why someone whose job involves logistics or who likes mechanical engineering might find them fascinating, but the trainspotting end of it leaves me cold. So a fairly significant moment of Alaskan railway action passed me by with the camera empty. Apologies to anyone who would have liked a frame.
The one-lens question
The other thing the Fuji had over the Bronica for travel was this. It is one focal length and that is it. There is no choosing. Walk a city street with the Fuji and you either frame what you see for 90mm or you don’t take the picture. There is something genuinely clarifying about that, especially in a place you don’t know well. The Bronica with its three lenses asks a question every time you stop. The Fuji answers it for you before you get there.
I had brought a 50mm equivalent lens for the Bronica on the Namibia and South Africa trips and I had used it less than I expected. That was already a hint. The 90mm equivalent on the GW690iii covers what your eye covers if you walk a slightly relaxed pace and look around. It is the photographer’s natural focal length, and in a city it teaches you to put your feet where the picture is rather than zooming with a knob.
Mad Men Studios on West 5th Avenue
Both rolls went into Mad Men Studios on West 5th Avenue the same afternoon. I had used them for the Part 1 rolls and they had turned 120 B&W around in 24 hours, which is genuinely impressive for any photo lab anywhere in the world, never mind a small one in Anchorage. They did the same again with these two. By the next afternoon I had the scans.
A note from the present. By the time of writing this piece up I cannot find Mad Men Studios online any more. Their old website has been taken over by an unrelated football site and there is no other working contact I can find for the lab. They may have closed down. If so, shame. They were an excellent service. If you are an Alaskan reading this and you know what happened, please leave a comment and I will update the piece.
I also had to leave the negatives in Alaska. The packing was tight and the flight home was the next day. Getting prints made and getting the negatives shipped home in 48 hours from Alaska to the UK was not realistic. The negatives stayed with Mad Men to be binned. I have the scans. The negatives are gone.
Losing the negatives is the kind of thing that, in a more organised photographic life, I would have prevented. The scans are good. The 6x9 files are big enough to stand on. But there is something about a negative that a scan can never quite be. The negative is the artefact. The scan is the evidence.
And now for the awkward bit
There is something I should tell you. The Fuji isn’t with me any more. I sold it on eBay almost as soon as I got home. A viewer of the channel bought it, at what I think was a fair price for both of us, and is hopefully out there using it now. Hello if that is you.
The reason is the boring one. I freelance. The job that took me out to Alaska had paid well but I was not going to see any of that money for another month or two. Rent and children need paying for in the present tense. The Fuji had cost something in the £700 region and that is a sum of cash that, when you are watching your bank account, just is not justifiable to keep sitting on a shelf. So onto eBay it went, and onto someone else’s shelf it has gone.
I want to be honest about what the sale told me about the camera. I have sold cameras before in similar situations. The Mamiya C330 went in much the same way and the truth is, when I clicked send on that one, I felt nothing. The C330 is a fine camera and it did its job. But it had not got under my skin. The Fuji had. Clicking send on the GW690iii hurt. I felt I was getting rid of something I had only just started to understand and that, if I had been able to hang on to it, would have become a real friend over the next few years.
That tells you everything you need to know about the verdict.
The verdict
Buy a GW690iii if you find one in good condition at a fair price. The lens is superb and the 6x9 negative is enormous, which is most of what you came here for. The build is plasticky in places but solid where it matters and the weight is well-judged for the carry. The biggest design flaw is the way the lens hood interferes with the filter thread and the control rings, which I covered in Part 1. Beyond that, this is a thoroughly capable camera that earns its place in any conversation about 6x9.
If you are choosing between the II and the III, the II is the better looker and the better build. The III is the lighter and more comfortable carry. There is no wrong answer there.
If money is no object and you want the wider focal length, the GSW690iii with its 65mm f/5.6 is also excellent, and I ended up with one of those some years later, which is a different piece. The earlier nickname I refused to use in Part 1 has a sibling nickname for the GSW which I am also refusing to use here. The streak holds.
What is next
The next thing in this Alaska sequence is also a camera bought in Alaska. While I was out there I wandered into a salvage yard on the Old Glenn Highway and came home with a 3x4 Speed Graphic I needed to talk myself into. It was loaded with 120 instead of quarter-plate sheet film, which is its own story.
There is also a 4x5 Speed Graphic now living back in the UK and waiting for some lens boards being 3D-printed for me by Simon Forster, who you may know better as Forster UK these days, of the orange lens caps and the Platypus drying rack. His work appears regularly on this channel and probably will for some time.
If you are still here, thank you. The Fuji has gone but writing the Part 1 mountains piece and this Part 2 city piece has been a way of pinning it down in memory. I am glad I had it and sorry I had to let it go. The nickname stays unused.