This photo was made using my Mamiya C220 TLR, an 80mm f/2.8 Mamiya-Sekor lens, and studio strobes. It took almost an entire pack of Instax Mini to get this shot. The Mamiya C220 was never designed for Instax Mini,^[1]I wrote about how I non-destructively “hacked” the C220 to shoot Instax Mini here. but I love the camera’s 80mm lens and wanted to see how close up I could focus. (It’s 35.4cm from the film plane^[2]The close-up focusing distances, along with the sizes of subject coverage, for all Mamiya’s TLR lenses are listed in the C220’s manual. in case you were wondering.)

I’m pretty pleased by the result. Taking close-ups with a TLR is a challenge. At that close a distance you have to compensate for parallax. The C220 has markings on the ground glass to assist with this, but it can still be a bit of trial and error to get everything aligned just right.

The little statuette of Tigger is my only souvenir from a family trip to Disneyland in 1980 when I was 10. We didn’t have a lot of money back then, so my parents packed me and my sister into the car and we drove all the way down the coast from Canada to California. It was a memorable road trip. Not only did my sister get car sick and throw up all over the back seat, but we also had to sleep in the car one night because my parents couldn’t find a motel with any vacancies.