Jack Dykinga: another one bites the d

[Dan Baumbach]

Honestly, I don't see why anyone would still shoot color 4x5 with the 20+ megapixel cameras and great TS lens that are out now. If I was shooting color I would be all digital without hesitation.

If you are printing digitally. What are the advantages to shooting 4x5 transparency/negatives and scanning? Is the resolution gap still a factor?

What am I missing?

Maybe we like shooting with view cameras. I don't think a 5DII equals what I get with a view camera. Medium format, probably, but I don't have a spare $40,000 which is what I figure I'd be out after I get the lenses too.

- Dan.

[Kirk Gittings]

Simple 3x or 4x stitching can bridge the gap between 4x5 and a full frame DSLR pretty well for prints up to around 16x20.

[Bill_1856]

[QUOTE=willwilson;558095]Honestly, I don't see why anyone would still shoot color 4x5 with the 20+ megapixel cameras and great TS lens that are out now.

$$

[Brian Ellis]

QT - I know Joe tested a bunch of stuff, but as I stated, I don't know if he actually
invested in any of it. Last time I talked to him, he was hypothesizing about a Mamiya
back and Arca system of his own. For his typical needs, I believe it would be unrealistic, because as we backpackers all age, the weight of any system becomes progressively important. He delves into all kinds of things to get a degree of expertise
in them, just like I do, so we talk shop from time to time - but taking the dive is another matter. Maybe he's done it, but I'll no doubt bump into him and find out directly. He certainly hasn't converted me, in any event. Just too much can go wrong
with MF digital in the backcountry, and it would be damn expensive to repair.

Digital photographers in the "back country" do the same thing film photographers have done for over a century. They carry a backup.

[Drew Wiley]

Kirk - in my book Muench is an artistic zero. Period. Large format snapshooter. I don't care how many books and calendars he's sold. Great for Arizona Highways,
which is an interesting magazine in its own right, and I'll give him credit for improving slightly over time - but composition????? Just the same old stereotypes
one after the other. Once he bragged about taking fifty 4x5 shots in a single day;
why am I not surprised? Million and millions served - he is indeed the McDonalds
of outdoor photography, if fast food is your thing. Not mine.

[Oren Grad]

Digital photographers in the "back country" do the same thing film photographers have done for over a century. They carry a backup.

Joseph Holmes is working with a Phase One P45+ back. It costs $24,000.

[r.e.]

I wonder whether the trend can be dismissed on the ground that the photographers in question are no good and/or have unlimited financial resources.

I'm going to take the liberty of repeating some things that I said in another thread.

In the last few months, I've spent a fair bit of time in public and private galleries in London, Paris and New York. As an observation, my sense is that this forum is increasingly out of touch with what is happening in the larger world of photography, and that more openness to technical developments and their practical and artistic use and impact would be healthy.

It strikes me as sort of willful, and not a little bit odd, if the position of this forum is that current work and techniques of people like Jeff Wall, Ed Burtynsky and Chris Jordan can't be discussed here, or at least can't be discussed unless one uses the right code words.

There is something perverse about the fact that current work by people like Wall is off-limits but we can have a whole thread, started by the founder of the forum no less, on a guy who jumps out of an airplane with a box camera attached to his helmet, because the camera has a sheet of 4x5 film in it: http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=58932

Meanwhile, the Royal Academy in London currently has an interesting show about geography and climate, running alongside their major exhibit on Van Gogh, that contains photographs by Burtynsky and Jordan, neither of which can be talked about because the capture medium isn't big enough to be discussed on this forum.

I guess that this thread demonstrates that there is a caveat to the foregoing. It is OK to talk about prominent photographers who are working with digital capture but large format output if the issue is their defection from the true path, or, to use the vernacular of the thread, that they have "bit the dust".

[Brian Ellis]

Joseph Holmes is working with a Phase One P45+ back. Those cost $24,000 each. Not many photographers can afford to carry a backup of one of those.

Actually I suspect that someone who can afford $24,000 for one can afford it for two. After state and federal taxes $24,000 to a highly successful professional photographer becomes about $13,000. But I wasn't really thinking of digital backs, I meant digital cameras. You don't need a digital back to get outstanding quality, a Canon 5D with excellent lenses will do just fine and the 5D Mark II will do it in spades.

[Ed Richards]

r.e.,

There are art forums out there, and general photography forums - I suspect many of us participate in them. This is, dare I say it, a big camera gear forum, with some posts on big camera pictures. While some of us are actually in this to take pictures, I think it is fair to say that a lot of members and lurkers are really just gear heads. (Look at the amount of gear sold as basically unused.) Even those of us who like to take pictures have some gear head tendencies or we would not be on this forum.

So, recognizing that there are other places to talk about photographic art that are not tied to format, I think it is fine to have this forum just be format-centric. You should think of this as a fetish site.:-)

[Drew Wiley]

QT - you're taking this from Joe's website. I honestly don't know what he's doing at
the moment, but I've spoken with him since he posted that. I'm in an analogous
situation. Certain equipment mfgs send me prototypes to solicit my opinion or obtain advance goodwill. I get in on focus groups with engineers. Sometimes I get to keep the stuff, sometimes I don't; sometimes I get to keep a little but have to purchase the balance. It's no different if you have an inside track with the digital photo industry. Joe does a lot of spin, like saying he has a background in carbon printing. Actually, to my knowledge, he only farmed out a couple trans to Evercolor which turned out terrible. The rest of his info he got from chatting, but that doesn't make
it bad info, because he's really into detail. I'd imagine at this point info is a bigger part of his income than prints. He's infectiously curious about everything. If Carr
Clifton actually has gone MF digital, I wouldn't be surprised if Joe does too, because they are friends and quite similar in outlook. But anyone who thinks MF digital can begin to approach LF, especially 8x10, in print quality, is putting a very unrealistic spin on it. Joe's own old Cibas from 4x5 absolutely blow away anything he's printed in inkjet, and he's one of the best inkjet printers I know. And he claims to spend over 40 hours per image doing digital corrections after the scan. Not exactly a labor saver. Of course, I'm not going to drag this into all the other pros and cons, especially since this is a moving target with the technology steadily improving. For anyone taking a lot of images, I can see the cost advantage of digital, especially if you're trying to avoid a scan. But to me Low-Tech offers many advantages. A fifty
year old stainless darkroom tray works as good today as it did new. How much of
this digital gear will be worth anything in ten years? If you can amortize it in the
interim, great. But I can't personally risk the investment for a step backward in
print quality. I'd love to get away from the odor of color chemicals, but that's another story. Maybe someday. But each of us makes our own rules, and that's the
way it should be.