Been shooting with a Pentax 67 mostly outdoors and never in the studio? It’s time to add another feather to your cap and get you working with strobes and modifiers. It can be intimidating to do since you don’t have the advantage of seeing your results immediately. But knowing how your medium format camera works — or syncs with flash, to be more specific — will make sure you to get properly exposed studio shots.
In the video above, Braedon Flynn of Film Supply Club shows us what can go wrong when you put your Pentax 67 to work in the studio. If you’re not yet familiar with your camera’s functions, you may miss an important detail for doing strobe photography: The shutter sync speed. Most cameras fire the flash at a shutter sync of 1/125s. However, with the Pentax 67, it’s 1/30s.
Flynn and his team weren’t aware of this, so their studio snaps were very underexposed. While he’s no stranger to studio photography using film cameras, he had never used a Pentax 67 in the studio before. So, he took the opportunity to remind film photographers of how important it is to study your film camera first before a shoot. You don’t want to blow an important shoot like he did!
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Slow sync. That was my only complaint about the 6×7. It was OK when you could control the ambient light but if you used flash for fill your only friend was the aperture.
There was a special lens with a leaf shutter available if you needed it. I was tempted to get it, but I didn’t need it as I shot mostly in studio.