philip_pj wrote:
Wayne, medium format colour slide film aka E6 used to be reckoned to contain around 12Mp of high quality digital for the same size, but of course it hwas a hot debate, with good points on both sides.
6x7 is around 4.4 times that size, and some of the lenses are magnifico (Mamiya 7/ Hass CZ), so you get a lot of data out of a well-exposed and scanned 6x7 transparency. For a personal view, I am only now seeing medium format like res out of the A900, but it needs the 21/2.8 to get there, and enlargability is always on film's side - film looks fantastic printed large, digital goes: good, good, good, oh no!
Black and white, no contest, none at all. B&W is seriously in another league for resolution. ...Show more →
Thanks Philip for the info. Have thought about getting a nice LF 8x10 camera for B&W landscape shooting since I have a V750 scanner.How easy is it to scan 8x10?
Great thread! I don't work with medium format, so will be observing for the most part.
Back a couple days ago or so, Carsten posted this in another thread. I think it's a great description of the difference between 35mm and larger film formats:
carstenw wrote:
Because of the small negative size, everything in the 135 format film process has been tuned for sharpness, from the lens designs to the chemical composition of the film, and through the developers and papers used, and I found that 135 results often looked sharp, but a bit strained or brittle, for example if you enlarged too much, they would fall apart. Okay, digital does that too, but by now we are mostly well beyond the resolutions needed to make nice prints with any sane size paper.
Medium and especially large format by contrast looks very relaxed and beautiful. It is hard for me to explain it better than that, but if you looked at enough negatives of both kinds, I think you might see what I mean....Show more →
philip_pj wrote:
Wayne, medium format colour slide film aka E6 used to be reckoned to contain around 12Mp of high quality digital for the same size, but of course it hwas a hot debate, with good points on both sides.
I dont worry too much about the blix being contaminated with developer, I mean thats its job, to neutralise the developer. Should I worry
Thanks! No, you probably don't have to worry. I just read somewhere that it was a good thing to add a stop bath. But it's also nice to be able to stop the development without having to pour in the blix at once, so you have more time to fiddle with all the bottles and stuff as long as you wish to.
And keep the windows open if you shower in the same room with these things, they're not the best thing to inhale!
Actually these chemicals are totally odorless, so I'm not worrying about that. Plus, I don't have a window in my shower anyway!
wayne seltzer wrote:
Nice one Martin!
Wondering how this would compare to 5d2 and ZE 21 resolution/detail wise?
Thanks! With a cheap flatbed scanner as my V700, I think the resolution is about the same. I get ~30 megapixels that is a little bit soft, but it also looks more natural than uprezzed digital files. With a drumscanner you'll probably get at least twice the linear resolution, if the film permits it.
An important thing is that the colors are quite different. You don't "blow" the red channel when shooting a red flower for instance, as you do with a digital camera if the rest of the scene is exposed properly. And you have much more lattitude in highlights, with colors still present in almost-washed-out skies and stuff like that.
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Three more from the same roll of Portra 400 and the SMC 6x7 55/4. I love the angle of view of this lens! It feels so different from 28 mm on 24x36.
I like those Pentax 55mm shots. I bet there's more detail in those negs if you can tame the contrast somehow... (akin to dodging/burning if printing them...)
That third shot is the look that so many people tone/post-process for, and it doesn't look quite this natural.
And the highlight latitude comment is the main reason I shoot neg film. My picture a few shots up of a park at dusk is an example -- on digital the areas around the leaves would be much less manageable. Same goes for your shot that's the first on this page.
Makten wrote:
An important thing is that the colors are quite different. You don't "blow" the red channel when shooting a red flower for instance, as you do with a digital camera if the rest of the scene is exposed properly. And you have much more lattitude in highlights, with colors still present in almost-washed-out skies and stuff like that.
A bit off-topic, but you can largely prevent blowing out individual colour channels on digital by using "UniWB" -- a custom white balance that has multipliers for the R/G/B channels of ~1.0.
Nice shots btw, although they seem to have a purple cast (on purpose?).
Must agree with carsten'e observation about the relaxed quality of medium and large format images, when well done. Maybe our eyes don't want to see eveything super sharp all the time. I recall one author of photo books say he used 35mm for the raw edginess of 'small format', which he preferred for his work on barns of the West (US).
It's a very active board, and LF people are very committed, and explore all issues to the max - you might enjoy it. 8x10 is easier than expected for many shooters, and (they say) you haven't seen anything quite like a contact print of an 8x10...from memory there are quite a few 8x10 cameras around also, and lenses that cover 8x10 are both cheap and plentiful. All four major makers (Schneider, Rodenstock, Fuji and Nikon) make them.
Thanks! It's the new Portra 400. Don't fool yourself, because I've tweaked the colors in PP, but the Portra is very nice in the way it lets you do that. Originally the sky was a bit too greenish.
