Even in this digital age the name Mamiya is synonymous with medium format... since 1940 the company has produced cameras in all the popular film sizes including several quite innovative 35mm models... and until very recently listed medium-format modular systems in 6x4.5 and 6x7cms with a near 645-sized medium-format “ZD” digital camera promised again at the 2006 Photokina. Gone is the modular 6x9 Press and both 6x6 Twin-Lens Reflex cameras... and more is the pity!

Note: I couldn’t find a photograph of a Mamiya TLR in my files so scanned a Mamiya C system advert from the French “Le Photographe” magazine published in 1970.

Mamiya TLRs were unique in their class in that they took interchangeable pairs of matched lenses and were designed for use at chest or waist-leve...l with a less convenient eye-level viewing option. This gave 6x6 users the ability to view the entire image area as a flat surface rather than at eye-level, as with 35mm cameras. Also the much larger projected view was detached from the reality of the subject because it was laterally reversed... the practical effect of this was that a subject could be more thoughtfully composed, re-posed and its lighting adjusted, all before the actual exposure was made.

All TLRs have the advantages of uninterrupted viewing combined with quiet operation, due to the fixed reflex-mirror, but share the disadvantages and problems of parallax viewing error at close focusing distances. Only the Mamiya TLR offered bellows extension focusing, giving very close focus with the wide-angle 55mm lens and full head sized portraits with the 250mm telephoto, while attempting to show the parallax correction clearly on the viewing screen as you focused.

The body of the Mamiya is literally a box on top of a box... one with an angled mirror for viewing the subject, the other with a clear path to the film plane. The nominal 6x6cm film size, actually 56x56mm, can be accommodated in fairly compact SLR camera bodies such as the also recently deleted Bronicas and the everlasting Hasselblad types... but TLRs are, by design, twice as tall.

The TLR design is only slightly more difficult to use or handle than a roll-film SLR. Although often used on a tripod (see image on the next page... although I think from the silhouette that the camera is in fact a Rollei TLR!), they can be used hand-held "on the run" with considerable ease... although not quite in the same league as 35mm film and digital cameras. One has only to look at the news and feature pictures of the '50s and '60s to see the quality and quantity that was produced by hard-pressed pressmen (and, unlike today, used in plenty by the newspapers) to realise that the TLR was an extremely versatile camera.

TLRs are not used any more for action photography... the last time I saw one at a sporting occasion was in the late 1970s when over 50 photographers turned up at Chelsea's football ground, each taking several motor-driven head-shots of every player... whilst the man from the Press Association just took a couple of pictures of the entire team as a group shot. Armed with his TLR he reckoned that individual head shots were just as easy to pull from the big negative as sorting through and printing from lots of 35mm ones. What's more he did two other big-time football teams on the same roll of film later on that day... which I call confidence!