Congrats on your purchase! The Mamiya TLR has a special place in my heart. I was given two C33s by the wife of a cousin. They were her father's wedding cameras and he had died of a massive heart attack. It was a very generous gift and put my on the path to professional photography, for a time. I later added an older Mamiyaflex (C3) with a kit of lenses, so had a 65mm, 80mm, 135mm and 180mm in the "stable". I never had a prism, but did have porrofinders, which use mirrors rather than prism.
I have waist level finders for them, but rarely used them, except in the camera room where the built in magnifier would allow for close examination of the ground glass for focusing when on a tripod. As far as tips, I can't think of many. One would be to scribe lines (or add thin tape) to the ground glass in a "tic-tac-toe" pattern to show you the 6x4.5 vertical and horizontal borders. Shooting, composing, and printing square is fine, but if you want something to fit in a standard frame it is nice to know where your edges are. Secondly, I'd advise the use of hoods on your lenses (you can fashion your own fairly easily). The lack of multi-coating on older lenses will benefit from the forgotten use of a lens hood. Your C330 has the ability to use 220 or 120 film (24 exposures, rather than 12). Which can be very nice - fewer film changes. I believe on the C330 you just rotate a plate inside the back to move the camera from 120 to 220 capability - effects the film counter mostly. The main thing to keep in mind when using a TLR is the parallax problem between the "taking" lens and the "seeing" lens. This is really only an issue when shooting close. (By the way the Mamiya TLR is superb at shooting close with its built-in bellows system. You can really rack the lens out there.) When you do an indicator will drop down in the finder to show you where the true top of the frame is (assuming you have set the lens focal length correctly on the camera - there is a knob for that purpose). That's nice to know, but you are losing the bottom of the frame completely (out of the viewfinder). Your other option (for tripod mounted shots) is to use a parallax corrector, which is essentially a scissors jack that lets you compose and then raise the camera to move the taking lens to the postion that the seeing lens was. Then you take the shot. This camera is also superb for double/multiple exposures, so if that is an area that interests you (like it does lomo shooters). To do that, don't crank the film advance... just cock the shutter on the lens manually and trip the shutter manually. This technique can be combined with masks in front of the lens, which we used in weddings for the old "couple looking down on their own candlelit wedding ceremony" shots. You can laugh now, but it was a big seller. :) The other big strength of this camera is that it is SO quiet. No mirror flopping, just the tiniest "snip" of the leaf shutter. This is a big plus for being as unobtrusive as possible (as is the waist level, should you take advantage of it. Photographer looking down is less noticable than photographer looking through a camera pointed at someone.) While it is a big camera, using it at waist level unobtrusively would make it a good medium format street photography camera. The leaf shutter has another huge advantage over focal plane shutters, which is flash sync at any shutter speed. (No curtain exposing the frame in sections, requiring a certain minimum shutter speed). The reasons for wanting to do this will probably be lost on most younger shooters today, but (for example) it allows you to use fill flash outdoors without getting the "artificial" look of too much flash fill. Google "leaf shutter" and sync at any shutter speed to learn more. Wanna see something really clever? I plan on trying this, since I have more than one body: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiffytumbleweed/3436321854/in/faves-pixelsmithy/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
