As some of you may have noticed, I really love shooting film photographs. I often carry a film camera around whenever I leave my home and I've shot multiple feature stories on film for no real reason other than I like to. I also like cars (I hope this is self-evident). After a childhood spent idolizing photographers like Larry Chen, blending my photography and automotive passions just feels right.
So when I got a new film camera to play with, it needed a proper test on a period-correct car.
First, the car: a perfect 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo. This car is owned by a friend of mine. She's had it for almost two decades, but a few years ago she decided to beat back the years of entropy and go over everything.
The car today is stunningly restored. She thinks of it as OEM+, rather than a pure restoration or a fully modified car.
That said, it's a big "+." She re-did everything.
The paint, for example, is hue-matched to Guards Red, but instead of the single-stage gloss paint Porsche actually used, it's metallic for more depth. The lighting is fully redone with brighter LEDs, but they're solid-state blinker relays with appropriate housings, rather than fast-blink eBay specials. Even the ECU is a Focus 9: a modern reverse-engineered replica of the original ECU that runs the original Porsche-programmed software, rather than a typical off-the-shelf standalone ECU that runs "close enough" to OEM.
Despite more than 200,000 miles on the odometer (and her lead-footed tendencies!), it is one of the prettiest 944s I've ever seen.
The camera I used was also an exciting classic: a Fujica GW690. This thing is huge (that small book it's on is six inches wide, for scale) and it takes medium-format film, instead of more typical 35mm canisters. It's a fixed lens paired with a rangefinder, not an interchangable-lens SLR like most modern digital cameras (or the '90s film cameras you remember using a while back). I've shot landscapes with it before, but I hadn't attempted automotive photography with it.
The first set of shots I took were very '80s. 1880s, to be exact. This black-and-white film is orthochromatic, which—unlike most modern black-and-white film—only has silver halide crystals and no dyes. This means that it is very sensitive to blue light, but red and green will be almost completely dark in the finished image. That's why my friend's 944 is virtually black in these shots. I also developed these myself at home—a first for me.
The chemicals I used weren't the freshest and it led to some odd development artifacts on really dark shots, like this one, but I was still happy enough with the attempt.
The color shots seen here were taken with Kodak Portra 400, a much more modern formulation that works perfectly in sunsets with bright-red cars. The massive surface of the 6cm x 9cm negative means that grain is essentially invisible, which gives an almost digital-like shot, but with much more depth of field than most digital cameras.
I haven't had a chance to drive this machine yet (who knows, maybe I'll write a retro review on it!) but in the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed the photos!
