This is another instalment of my local businesses series, where I visit somewhere interesting near home and try to do them justice with my cameras. Jolies Fleurs is a wonderful florist in Thornbury run by Jo and her team (Mandy and Jill), and they kindly let me spend a few hours photographing them at work. The team were brilliant. The photographs were a learning experience. This article is about both.
If you live anywhere in South Gloucestershire and you want flowers from people who care about flowers and have an eye for distinctive arrangements, go to Jolies Fleurs. They do not do the run-of-the-mill chrysanthemums-and-carnations bouquets. Their style is free-flowing, with air between the stems, where the flowers do what flowers naturally want to do. It is genuinely refreshing.
This article is also the first real outing for the Speed Graphic 4x5 on this side of the channel and the second outing for the Mamiya Super 23 after I had picked one up a few weeks earlier. Both cameras get a fair review here, with all their virtues and all the lessons they taught me.
I should warn you up front: this shoot did not go particularly well. I was over-ambitious, I brought too much kit, I underestimated the lighting situation, and a few things broke. The photographs that came out are not my best work. But the experience taught me real lessons that I have carried into every shoot since, and the team at Jolies Fleurs deserve their article regardless of my technical fumbles.
Why this shoot
The plan was twofold.
Camera one: photograph the team going about their normal work, in motion, candidly. Capture the rhythm of a florist’s day. For this I wanted the Mamiya Super 23 press camera with the 6x9 back, because press cameras are supposed to handle exactly this kind of fast-moving, in-the-moment work.
Camera two: slow down and do some more deliberate posed portraits with the team. For this I wanted the Speed Graphic 4x5 because it forces you to slow down, and because I had a few interesting lenses to try with it.
Two cameras, two approaches, one shoot. What could possibly go wrong?
(Most things.)
![PLACEHOLDER: the Mamiya Super 23 with the 6x9 back and the Speed Graphic 4x5 with one of the antique lenses, laid out together before the shoot]
The team and the shop
A note about the people before the cameras.
Jo owns Jolies Fleurs. She was a primary school teacher for over twenty years before deciding she had another adventure left in her and retraining as a florist. Five or six years in now. The retraining-into-floristry path is one I would not have predicted, and the way Jo talks about it suggests it was genuinely the right move.
Mandy works with Jo and has a face you cannot stop watching, particularly when she does not realise she is being filmed. One of my favourite frames from the day is of Mandy in the middle of a moment where she has just realised the camera is rolling. Her expression is worth the whole sheet of Portra it was captured on.
Jill also works there but firmly does not want to be on camera, and that is entirely her right. Jill is mentioned with gratitude but not photographed.
The flowers in the shop the day of the shoot included:
- Celosias (cockscomb): Jo’s favourite, and you can see why
- Gerberas in multiple colours, bringing happiness
- Delphiniums providing height
- Sanguisorba (burnet) which makes a bouquet “dance like a dancing bouquet” (Jo’s words)
- Red Naomi roses
- Eryngium (blue sea holly)
- Hypericum (green berries)
- Allium
- Skimmia for the Christmas arrangements
- Limonium (purple statice)
- Anthurium in multiple colours
This is not the flower list of a run-of-the-mill florist. Each of these would make a different bouquet feel different. Jo and the team work with an unusually broad palette and they know what each stem brings.
Mamiya Super 23: the camera that mostly worked
The Super 23 is the press camera I had been wanting to try in actual press camera conditions. It mostly worked. Some things did not.
What is it
The Mamiya Super 23 is a 1970s medium format press camera, part of the Mamiya Press family that also includes the Mamiya 23, the Mamiya Universal, and several other models. Rangefinder focusing (linked, properly calibrated), interchangeable backs (I have the 6x9 back giving 8 frames per roll on 120), interchangeable lenses, and a solidly built body that feels like it could survive a war.
Designed for press photographers of that era who needed:
- Big negatives for newspaper reproduction
- Fast handheld operation
- Decent low-light capability
- Interchangeable lenses for different working distances
I had used it once before with my mannequin Gertie as a test subject and got sharp results. This was the first real-world test.
What went wrong
Two problems:
1. The film back malfunctioned. A small catch on the back was stuck in the release position, which meant the frame counter did not work and the film did not stop at frame spacings. I had to guess at how much to wind on between frames. I went for roughly two full strokes based on what I remembered from my earlier test outing. The result: some uneven spacing on the developed roll, and I got about five or six frames instead of the usual eight.
2. The rangefinder was hard to see in the low light. Jolies Fleurs is genuinely dimly lit by my Reveni Labs spot meter’s standards. The Mamiya’s rangefinder uses a small bright spot in the centre of the viewfinder for focus matching, and that spot becomes hard to see when the background image is dim. I had to find areas of contrast (vertical lines, edges) to align the rangefinder against, then reframe, then shoot. By the time I had done all that, Jo had moved.
I had also recalibrated the rangefinder the day before the shoot and not properly tested it. So I was working with an untested calibration in difficult conditions, on a camera with a fault, trying to capture moving subjects in low light. Not optimal.
What worked anyway
To my surprise, given the litany above:
The recalibration was correct. When I managed to get the rangefinder spot aligned, the frames came out sharp. The calibration job from the previous day had been good.
The lens is excellent. The Super 23’s standard lens produces big, sharp, contrasty 6x9 negatives that hold up to enlargement. The glass quality is genuinely impressive for a press camera.
Some of the frames I am genuinely happy with. Particularly a frame of Jo with the flowers, caught mid-arrangement, sharp where it needed to be sharp. Worth the difficulty.
The pro 400H ran out before I had finished, and reluctantly, the last of my Pro 400H rolls because that film is discontinued and getting irreplaceable. I switched to Lomography Color 400 for the remaining frames.
My respect for press photographers
Here is the bit I want to highlight from this experience.
Working a press camera in real press conditions is genuinely hard. The cameras are heavy. The rangefinders are fiddly. The film loading is slow. The shutters need cocking separately from the wind-on. The whole workflow is built around a kind of deliberate fast-shooting that takes years to internalise.
Press photographers from the 1950s-1970s were better than I will ever be. They worked these cameras at the pace of a daily newspaper, in all conditions, with no second chances. I had ultimate respect for them coming in. I have even more respect for them now.
Could you build that speed and confidence with sustained practice? Probably yes. Will I personally ever get there? Almost certainly not, since I do not need to in the way they did. But the experience gave me a new appreciation for what those photographers achieved.
Speed Graphic 4x5: the camera that did not deliver
The Speed Graphic part of the shoot was meant to be the calm, deliberate, properly-lit portrait session. It was not.
What is it
The Speed Graphic is the classic American press camera, 4x5 format, built by Graflex from 1912 to 1973. The defining feature for me: it has a focal plane shutter in the back, which means you can use lenses that have no shutter of their own (barrel lenses, brass lenses, old uncoated antique lenses). This makes the Speed Graphic the ideal camera for anyone collecting interesting old glass.
Mine is a 3x4 inch Speed Graphic (slightly smaller format than the more common 4x5 Speed Graphics), but for this shoot I had it set up with 4x5 sheets in a back.
The lenses I brought:
- Carl Zeiss Tessar 135mm f/4.5, originally salvaged from an ICA Ideal (the same lens that started my whole large format journey when I rescued it from that camera). Now properly mounted on a Speed Graphic lens board.
- Dallmeyer 8.5 inch f/4.5, another antique brass lens
- Ross Teleros 9 inch f/5.6 from 1922, originally designed for 3.25 x 2.25 inch glass plate cameras but giving edge-to-edge sharpness on 4x5 in my testing
Three lovely antique lenses on a serious large format camera. This was supposed to be the photography-as-art portion of the shoot.
What went wrong
The fundamental problem: I did not have enough light.
I had brought one small light to the shop with the idea of using it to isolate Jo against the busy background of flowers. The aim was to create images where Jo would be illuminated and the surrounding shop would fall into atmospheric darkness, with flowers as faint suggestion rather than busy clutter.
The light I brought was nowhere near strong enough for the 4x5 format, the antique lenses (wide-open at f/4.5 or f/5.6 still much slower than modern fast lenses), and the indoor conditions.
I underexposed every Speed Graphic sheet. I was trying to keep the shutter speeds in handheld-friendly territory and got the exposure calculation wrong on the side of too dark.
The results: very contrasty negatives where the highlight on Jo’s face holds up but everything around her falls to pure black. The “faint atmospheric flowers” effect I wanted became “completely absent flowers”. The photographs are essentially portraits against a black void.
What I should have done
With hindsight, the correct answer was obvious: go back to the old method.
The Speed Graphic with antique brass lenses is at its best when you treat it like a Victorian photographer would have treated it. Forget the focal plane shutter for low-light work. Use the lens cap. Open it, count seconds, close it. Half a second is easy to time accurately with a lens cap pull.
With proper exposure times in the half-second to two-second range, the existing ambient light in the shop would have been enough for proper exposure with the antique lenses. The slow shutter would have given me motion blur on anything moving, but Jo could pose still for two seconds. The Speed Graphic was telling me to slow down, and I was trying to shoot it fast.
Lesson learned. Next time I take antique brass lenses into a dim space, lens cap exposures are the answer.
What worked anyway
Despite the underexposure problems:
One frame of Mandy in the background with her bucket came out beautifully on the Dallmeyer 8.5 inch. The exposure happened to be closer to correct for that frame, and the rendering of Mandy with the soft flowers around her is exactly what I wanted from the whole session. One frame from a roll of 4x5 sheets, but a real one.
The Speed Graphic shutter and the 4x5 system worked correctly. The fault was entirely in my exposure calculation, not in the equipment. The camera is ready for next time.
The antique lenses confirmed their character. Even on the underexposed negatives, I could see the rendering difference between the modern Schneider and the antique Tessar, Dallmeyer, and Ross. I now have confidence that these lenses do something distinctive, which I would later test more systematically in the antique brass lenses comparison shoot.
![PLACEHOLDER: the keeper frame of Mandy with her bucket on the Dallmeyer 8.5 inch f/4.5, showing the kind of atmosphere the antique lens produces when exposed correctly]
What I learned
A summary of the lessons from a shoot that taught me more than most successes have.
1. Do not bring too much kit. I had two cameras, three antique lenses, multiple film stocks, and a malfunctioning film back. Half as much equipment and twice as much focus would have produced better photographs. I have followed this rule on every local businesses shoot since (including Wren Birds of Prey, where I deliberately took one camera).
2. Test calibrations before they matter. Recalibrating a rangefinder the day before a shoot without proper testing is asking for trouble. Calibrate, test, calibrate again, test again, then trust. Or use a different camera for the actual shoot.
3. Light is not optional. If you want a particular lighting effect in a 4x5 portrait, bring enough light. One small LED panel does not turn a dim florist shop into a studio. Either bring proper lighting or work with the available light using long exposures.
4. The lens cap technique still works. When in doubt with antique lenses in low light, lens cap exposures with the focal plane shutter open. The old way of doing things is the old way of doing things for a reason.
5. Respect press photographers. Working a press camera in press conditions is genuinely hard. Acknowledge the skill of the people who did it for a living.
The verdict on the two cameras
Mamiya Super 23: an excellent medium format press camera. £200-300 typically. Recommended if you want big negatives in a relatively portable form factor with rangefinder focusing. The film back fault is fixable. The rangefinder difficulty in low light is real but workable with practice. I would buy this camera again and I am keeping mine.
Speed Graphic 4x5: a versatile large format camera with the unique advantage of a focal plane shutter for shutterless lens use. £300-400 for a 3x4 like mine, more for a 4x5. Best used with the lens cap technique for antique lenses or with proper lighting for modern lenses. The Jolies Fleurs shoot was my fault, not the camera’s.
Thanks to the team
Huge thanks to Jo, Mandy, and Jill at Jolies Fleurs. You put up with my crazy ideas, you held still when I asked you to hold still, you let me into your workspace for an afternoon, and you made me feel genuinely welcome. The shoot was a learning experience for me. The afternoon was a delight.
Find Jolies Fleurs:
- Website: joliesfleurs.co.uk
- Instagram: @joliesfleursflowers
- Facebook: Jolies Fleurs Flowers
If you are anywhere in the Thornbury or South Gloucestershire area and you want distinctive, free-flowing arrangements with character, this is the florist for you.
What’s next on the channel
Next up will be a guide to medium format film cameras in all their varieties: what is out there beyond the top-ten lists, with cameras for every budget. That article exists now if you are reading this from the chronologically-later perspective. It includes both the Mamiya Super 23 and the Speed Graphic in their respective categories.
I am also planning more local businesses shoots in the coming months. I would love to do a dedicated black and white shoot for one of them so I can take the negatives into the darkroom for serious printing. More on that soon.
If you have a local business near where I live that you think would make a good subject for a shoot, drop me a comment. I am always looking for the next one.