A roll of Ilford HP5+ and my Bronica ETRSi

Along with my photo taking in late 2025, I also brought along my (very heavy) Bronica ETRSi setup, where possible. I feel a little bad not shooting very often with my ETRSi, it's a great camera system and I love shooting 120 (even if I am only getting 15 shots per roll). But I guess I get "decision paralysis", more with what to shoot, as I mentally hear ka-ching! sounds each time I press that shutter.

Anyway, I took a photo of these power lines when I was on holiday with my family last April (wow! that long ago!) and I like how this turned out, it almost looks like an album cover from Massive Attack or something.

This was taken with the Bronica 50mm PE f/2.8 lens by the way (I'm not sure why this detail doesn't seem to appear here, something to debug in my blogging software for sure).

The shot above I wasn't 100% happy with. I'm not sure if the shot was underexposed in the camera, or something happened at development time, but the shot looks washed out. I actually had to bring it back a bit in Lightroom Classic. I've been wanting to change my choice of film lab lately, as my usual have hiked their prices up again, making those ka-ching! sounds I mentioned earlier ever so loud on each shutter button press. This shot was taken from Sullivan's Lookout just outside of Mt Beauty.

This shot came out pretty well I think, considering that I didn't have a working method of releasing the shutter on the ETRSi at the time. The cable release I had with me was basically trash, I think I spent about $10 on it and it was worth the inverse of that. I've since purchased an old-school wire braided release that I can confirm works A-OK with my ETRSi, but it's too late now.

I have no idea what happened here. Did I wind on the next frame while the shot was still being taken? I thought the ETRSi has a whole heap of interlocks to prevent mistakes like this to happen. It's not all contained in the frame either, when I look at the negatives you can see the smear goes outside of the frame.

If anyone knows what happened here, I'd love to know – you can message me on Mastodon @[email protected].

I guess where the "late 2025" comes from for this blog post, is the last couple of shots I took on this roll of Ilford. To be honest, I just wanted to use up the roll so I could get it developed and check out the photos I made. So at our family Christmas lunch, I whipped out the ETRSi and took some shots of the food on the table. When I was looking through my prism viewfinder however, I noticed that the metering was only appearing in the LCD screen at the bottom for a split second. The battery check LED lit up fine, but it looked like it didn't have enough juice for metering. I metered off my iPhone, and of course the shots came out blurry as I was shooting in a kitchen, but here's a shot of a delicious Greek desert called galaktompoureko.

I think it probably would've looked better in colour as you get to see the golden brown syrupy crust of the pie, but on the other hand in black and white you get to see more flaky texture, which is nice. The galaktompoureko tasted delicious, by the way.

To be honest I'm not sure if I am feeling black and white in 120 format. I seem to have more success with 35mm black and white stock. I've still got some rolls of 120 B&W in the fridge, so I'm not writing off the format completely, but I'm not blind and I can see I am clearly in a rut here with this format. I'll see how I go in future.