New Luminouse Landscape Article

[naturephoto1]

Hi Howard,

Don't forget that you will not be using the entire 4 X 5 frame with the Better Light back. Therefore, all of your lens focal lengths will record as longer. You will require one or more additional lens wider than your usual for 4 X 5 in your kit for your wider views.

Rich

[Howard Slavitt]

Right, but it's close to the "full frame" of a 4 x 5 back.

[Michael T. Murphy]

Not sure this is the *greatest* thread to post that in Howard, but let us know the results of your decision making.

By $12T, did you mean $12K in US dollars? Sorry, I do not know the abreviation if that is another currency.

I need to do something very soon. In the last two months I have spent $400 per month on 4x5 film and developing for a personal project. I can only afford 1 more month, that will be a total of $1,200 ...

For me, the most important number in looking at alternatives is annual depreciation. I estimate the depreciation on a Canon 1DsII at $1,000 for the next year. The first two years that I owned mine it was $1,500 per year - from $7,800 in January 2005 to $4,800 in Jan 2007.

I will wait to see if Canon announces anything in September. I'll also have to take a look at net cost for a Mamiya ZD back per year, along with other used MFDB options. I just can't keep spending the money I am on film - about the same as I was in 1998, $5,000 per year.

Best,
Michael

[Jiri Vasina]

Reading the whole thread, there are a lot of valuable arguments (for both sides - digital and film). But one has not been brought around:

how much at ease do you feel when staying for several tens of minutes or even hours in the same place (roughly) with $10k several times more expensive equipment? Sometimes you are in a solitude, no one else around, so no worries. But then again, you might be around a lot of people and someone might think of your equipment changing hands...

I had a bit of this problem myself when I started shooting with Pentax 67, it was worth several times my monthly salary at that time (and I don't get paid for photography at all). After a year or two I eased with this feeling. But I'm not sure I'd ever ease enough with a $20k equipment. A lot of times I'd think if I should dare to bring the camera out of the pack, let alone stay there for one or two hours... With film if everything was stolen on such occasions, it maybe worth a 1/10 or even a 1/100, so the worries would be significantly smaller - and me getting more pictures in the process and enjoying it much better

Maybe I'm the only one with such a concern.

[Howard Slavitt]

I agree, Jiri, that how comfortable one feels with such expensive equipment IS a valid concern. Today (as opposed to yesterday), I'm much less enamored of the betterlight scanning back idea. One of the reasons is, as you point out, the concern of theft or whatever else happening to the equipment. It would diminish my enjoyment in travelling to far away places, which is a large part of my joy with photography. What I really want is a foveon-like (i.e. capturing all three colors at each sensor site), full-frame DSLR, hopefully that takes Canon or Nikon lens mounts. In the meantime, I may buy an Ebony 45SW and play around with it with negative color film and a 6cm x 12cm panoramic back, and just pay the cost of film and developing vs. depreciation of high end digital equipment. I'd look seriously at the Mamiya ZD back if you could attach it to a platform like the Cambo Wides (which will take a lens like the 24mm schneider), but without that ability, it becomes much less interesting. The problem with all of the medium format single shot backs is that their sensor size is too small to make using camera movements at all feasible, unless it's a tilt shift lens. Pretty much everyone who has tried to use them that way is in agreement.

[cgf]

...they are comparing two entirely different things...

Excellent point.

I am curious whether, if I were to be presented with several large prints of a similar/identical scene taken with digital capture and large format film, printed via wet darkroom, scanned film, inkjet (etc)... would I see a real difference?? Let each photographer participating use their 'best' method, no restrictions. I've often thought this would be far more interesting than the 'turn everything into digital and print once scanned, re-sampled & re-sized' style of comparison usually seen.

And for even more fun... run some kind of blind test afterwards to see if the participating photographers themselves can truly tell the difference in the final product.

Of course the result wouldn't change the reality of digital capture (convenience but at the cost of computers, photoshop time, etc) v film, but it would still be interesting...

Chris.
(waiting patiently until used betterlight backs hit ebay at <$1000...)