Learning through making mistakes

I picked up the first film that I took with my new Mamiya M645 from being developed today, and I got quite a surprise. Out of the 15 photos that were on the roll, 4 or 5 were of quite a good standard. While that doesn't seem particularly successful, I'm happy with the results for a number of reasons.

To start with, I've never used a medium format camera before, and I've certainly never used a camera with a waist level finder. Add to that the fact that I've gone from having a camera with an exposure meter in the viewfinder, to having to use an old hand held light meter, and it's a surprise I got any successful images at all. One thing that has been brought home to me is that while the hand held meter is going to give me a start to my exposure, I'm going to have to compensate for things like uneven brightness, overly bright or dark scenes, and so on.

Out of all the photos I took, I was most surprised to see that the first photo I took with the camera came out very well. It's just a shame that the subsequent ones were not to the same standard! Even though the rest were not all as successful as the first, having kept notes on what my exposures were, and knowing that in all cases I was using an exposure suggested by the light meter, I'll be able to adjust in the future, and hopefully have a much better success rate.