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Why I'm taking the medium format "plunge"

v-system

New Member
I have been around film cameras my whole life. From the 110's I played with as a child, to the Kodak Disk system, the giveaway plastic 35mm's littering second-hand stores to my first "real" camera, the Yashica Electro 35 GSN. My first automated SLR was the Canon Elan IIe -a camera I thought was the end all of modern convenience until... ta-da- digital took all their glory away. Suddenly I didn't have to pay for printing the crappy pictures I was taking along with the good ones on the roll. Suddenly I could take hundreds of pictures and only have to worry about changing batteries. Now there were new problems to deal with like digital noise, automatic exposure decisions that looked good on the teensy screen but wretched on the monitor, prints that looked as though I had an even coating of sand on my lens when later enlarged and printed. But with all this experience I was not quite ready to give up digital.

Then I took a trip to Seattle and whilst on layover in Anchorage I picked up a copy of Popular Mechanics magazine that had an article entitle "The Digital Ice Age." The article spoke of the problem of changing data formats in software, hardware becoming obsolete at incredible rates and how, for the average citizen, data can easily become corrupted and irrecoverable. It hypothesised a world in which an entire generation's work was lost to such speedy advancement and that this data would never fully be recovered and it made me worry. As I started critically looking at how much data I was storing, how it was being backed up and what I could do to ensure that my precious work was not corrupted I stumbled upon a terrible reality: I had unknowingly lost two full years of photographic and personal data I thought had been transferred to a new computer. It was lost forever!

I now triple back all my data that must be computerized but the photos I take now for the purposes of art and record are all recorded on film. I chose to embrace medium format because of the incredible increases in clarity and color reproduction it has become famous for. 35mm film served my purposes for many years but was limiting both in format shape and size. There were countless times having a square format, large transparency would have made a shot for me that I couldn't reconcile cutting off 1/3 of a tiny 35mm negative to take. Medium format will, for me, mean peace of mind, slower, more contemplative shooting and a 4x increase in detail and color rendition I could have no other way. It seemed the only logical choice for me.
 
I completely agree. Everytime one of my friends talks about loosing some data, forgetting to back up or general computer problems, I am attacked by a shudder of panic. But then I remember, that I still have all my negatives and I slowly relax.

It also means, that I do not have to store large files, since I just scan negatives in smaller format and can scan them again later if I need to.

There are some trade offs however, including image manipulation, geotagging and fast searching through your library.
 
Unfortunatly my Canon 5DII gives superior image quality to my film days with the Hassy. This was/is a limitation with film. I have alwaysed like the way of working with the Hassy.

However after quite a number of years I took the plunge and bought the DFV50 which isn't much different in practicality from using film and with many advantages. Certaily the images the now ancient 500CM is capable of producing digitally with careful work is quite astounding.

Chers: T
 
Been printing some images from a recent trip to NZ. The detail in a 16x20 print, which is really an "ensmallment", is quite astounding, even very close examination does not reveal all of the possible resolution and detail.

So I probably need a bigger printer! Of course a practical considerati is how many need very large images?

Cheers: Tom
 
Small comment: The 500CM with CFV 50 is much less prone to acquire dust on the sensor, even with frequent lens changes in the field, due to the secondary shutter. Any thing that does get through seems to be quite dry from circulating in the "box" for a while, and is easily blown off the sensor.

T
 
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