For more serious film shooters, however, it’s often seen as the professionals' 35mm in that the negatives are tiny in comparison to 6x7, 6x9, and large format systems. For digital shooters, the rendering of 645 film is pretty wild. I know it was for me initially. I will address the elephant in the room: negative size. It doesn’t bother me, but I know many people have issues with it. Only having a center point means a lot of focusing and recomposing.
In darker situations, you’ll want to manual focus. The continuous mode is downright awful and unusable, but single is snappy given enough light. You have two modes: continuous and single, and they both run off of a single autofocus point in the center of the frame. Overall, operation is easy if you’ve used any digital camera with interchangeable lenses.Īutofocus is definitely a touchy subject for this camera. The mode dial and the meter are about the same as any digital camera as well.
Aperture and shutter speed get their own dials, and ISO is set on the back with an annoyingly unresponsive set of up and down arrows. The button layout is fairly simple and nearly identical to the digital 645DF and DF+ bodies.
Compared to any full-frame DSLR, the viewfinder is massive, and that helps tremendously for manual focus and composition considering I wear glasses. The camera itself is built pretty well, it’s plastic on the outside but it doesn’t have much flex to it so it feels solid in your hands. The slightly improved autofocus of the newer models wasn’t a huge factor for me considering it’s mostly a portrait camera.Īfter shooting with it for a few months I have few bad things to say, and those are nitpicks. Considering the backs that I had been using would fit an AFD, I saved a few hundred dollars and went with it. The newer the camera, the newer the back you can use on it. After doing a bit of research, I found that the biggest difference between the 645AF, 645AFD, 645AFD II, and 645AFD III is digital back compatibility. It’s actually not a hard decision even though there are four to choose from. I decided that for digital back integration and overall ease of use, I was going to ante up and buy an AF model 645. And again, I found myself shopping for another film camera. But not every job required it and I wasn’t about to buy one for personal work. I was shooting on the current (at the time) 645DF+ and was in love with medium format again. I searched the Internet for a manual winder or another motor drive and was unable to turn one up, I gave up on it once again.įinally, I started using digital backs for select projects here and there. The next few times I picked it up, the motor drive withered away and I unfortunately had no other way to advance the film.
I learned that film was a little more difficult to work with that I had originally imagined and the camera got shelved for a while. Coupled with a decently clean 80mm lens, I started shooting like a madman. I ended up buying a beat up Mamiya 645 Super instead. As someone that wasn’t getting paid to shoot at the time, even the 645AF, the cheapest of the lot, was out of my price range. After doing some research I stumbled upon film 645 cameras. Unfortunately, the cost of entry was a little steep for a digital back. The focus falloff and rendering was just so surreal compared to full-frame and crop-sensor cameras that I had been shooting with. Since developing an appreciation for Joey L’s work, I wanted to shoot medium format. This is more or less the camera that started film photography for me.