Crown And Flint Photo

As a Christmas gift to myself, I bought a massive 250mm f/5.5 Mamiya Press lens to use on . It's about as heavy as a 70-200 f/2.8 for full frame digital, but the front element is huge, with a whopping 105mm filter thread.
As I suspected, it doesn't quite cover Instax Wide (see second photo*). What I didn't expect is that the coverage circle is largely uniform across all focus distances; I was hoping for better coverage at portrait ranges. That tells me that the limiting factor isn't necessarily the optics, but probably the lens mount itself.
I did a little experimenting and found one bit of focus range around 14m that mostly covers Instax Wide. I think that's the sweet spot between the actual optical circle and the mechanical limits of the lens mount.
This does limit the utility with Instax Wide to dark scenes or black backdrops, but I somewhat expected that. I was thinking more about using this with Instax Mini, which fits easily in the image circle at all distances, for events & concerts.
Those Mamiya engineers really squeezed every possible ounce of performance out of their Press cameras.
(No lens pics yet, I'll do a glamor gear shoot with it soon.)

One of the last hurdles in my work with has been the getting the framelines in the viewfinder to match the scene at a given range. In some ways, this was just as much work as getting the rangefinder coupling right, but it was much easier to ignore because I could guesstimate composition, but you can't guesstimate range. It involved things like shimming the rangefinder assembly to get it pointed the right direction, and I found that the surface finish of my printed parts had an outsized impact on this. I'm starting to write up documentation for how you assemble one of these cameras, and it is still very much a matter of trial & error, with no two builds having quite the same adjustments. It was also a reminder that if it *can* be adjusted it, it *has* to be adjusted.
This isn't quite a "before & after" post because I somehow misplaced the actual "after" photo, but it still gets the point across: for nailing composition, this work mattered.

The 90mm lens pairs so well with Instax Mini on . It is tiny & light, it is fast and focuses close, it almost exactly matches my preferred "50mm lens on 35mm film" field of view, and it fits the 100mm framelines in the Mamiya Press rangefinder quite nicely.
I had swapped lenses between packs of film (no, I still don't have a dark slide on my Instax Mini back) just in time for to join on stage for a duet. I probably couldn't have gotten this shot with the 150mm without hopping on top of the bar.
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Time for a little photo dump!
Would you meet me in a parking deck for a disco party?

Time for a little photo dump!
Somehow, this photo I snapped while up at .Con NYC 2025 never made it to my feed, so here it is. I tried a few photos with brighter exposures trying to capture any detail in the foreground, but they all blew out the background. In the end, I opted to have the foreground just be a shadow and exposed for the background. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the only reason the background was even remotely in focus is because I was stopped way down, but this still turned out great.

Although I'm still refining the design of my , I try to keep one "good" copy ready to go. Recently I took it out to an event in Brunswick, MD and it did not disappoint in spite of a few technical limitations.
The 150mm lens really shines on Instax Wide, but I'm starting to get the itch for a 250mm for more reach. Maybe I'll just have to eat the tariffs and get one, because there aren't any good options available domestically.