Digital medium format

[MDM]

2 hours ago, Malcolm Park said:

 ... now shoot with two Nikon Z8 bodies and a mix of Z and earlier Nikon AF lenses (often at 5000-8000 iso) and cannot fault them, I’m sure similar contemporary systems from other manufacturers are as good and as flexible. To my work mix digital medium format has no advantage.

 

Oh, and my Mamiya 7 medium format gave up the ghost after arriving near the summit of Kilimanjaro when the battery "froze" at 07.00am. Worked again when it got back down to 15,000ft.

 

My favourite camera by a long way. Probably the best full frame camera (DSLR or mirrorless) ever made. Does everything and a bit more on top. Nikon have surpassed themselves lately. Back on top. 

 

Talking of which, I got to the summit of Lascar Volcano in the Andes of Chile back in 1992 at over 5500 metres (over 18,000 ft). When I went to get out my camera, I realised I'd left all my spare film in the jeep about 2000 metres below except for the remains of a roll of Ektachrome 400 slide film in the camera. I got some very grainy shots which suited the very grainy brown desert landscape in an arty sort of way but it was very disappointing and I had to wait over a month to see what I had captured. Gimme a Z8 anyday. 

Edited June 29 by MDM

[Mark Scheuern]

5 hours ago, MDM said:

 

I would guess that is the exception rather than a common usage. I doubt there are too many professional sports or wildlife photographers using medium format cameras. As the author of  Sally's Photography Life article says medium format is not deal wildlife photography but can now be considerd viable. He emphasises the lack of telephoto lenses among other things. Nikon, Canon and Sony remain dominant in these areas. You can still get one helluva crop from a 45MP sensor that shoots tens of frames per second in raw and into the hundreds in JPEG if desired. And the image stabilisation in the latest Nikons is superb. 

 

 

It probably is. His main gear is Canon stuff. He uses Leicas as well. I certainly can't argue that he's wrong considering he gets more than enough work for him and his people to handle. 

[Mark Scheuern]

5 hours ago, MDM said:

 

And then there is his one liner on Leica lovers "You have to love Leica, otherwise you can't explain why you paid so much money for something that isn't quite as good at some things than less expensive gear."

 

Ha, I resemble that remark!

 

That reminds me, I was a member of some Leica mailing list in the early 2000s and there was often comments that autoexposure was the work of satan and how glad they were that Leica didn't have it on their rangefinder cameras, with their far superior and much faster manual system. Then the M7 came out and all of a sudden they were praising autoexposure as the greatest thing, ever. 

I love my Leicas but, yeah, those people can get a bit weird. 

 

Edited June 29 by Mark Scheuern

[spacecadet]

I saw the MF Leica once, at Photokina, behind glass.

Probably bulletproof.

[Betty LaRue]

23 hours ago, Sally Robertson said:

 

Hello again Betty, I am back home again now and able to look at the image on my computer. I can see the funny area around the bird. I can also see a splotchy effect in the sky. I actually see both of these things often happen with our images here on Alamy when they are converted to a lower res image to appear on the Alamy website. For example, if you have a look at areas of blue sky on many Alamy images you will see that splotchy effect. So it's like something similar has happened with the osprey image. I don't think it's sharpening artefacts and I don't think it would be in the RAW file, but somehow has happened in the JPEG conversion. You can see it a bit in the other images as well. I wonder if it is more pronounced taking such large image files from a medium format camera and reducing them to much smaller jpegs to appear in an article?

Yes, I can see that happening. It’s good when someone has a failure & can offer the raw at a hosting site or otherwise no one would ever be able to judge it on its merits!