I can only agree to it all Bernice, very well said...Originally Posted by Bernice Loui
but that makes me the more curious about the ones made by mr. Unkefer himself, who showed us only his outstanding but somewhat bulky apparatus:
noblesse oblige!
I can only agree to it all Bernice, very well said...
but that makes me the more curious about the ones made by mr. Unkefer himself, who showed us only his outstanding but somewhat bulky apparatus:
noblesse oblige!
Good question. A lot of the photographs of New York City are shot from Queens or Brooklyn across the Hudson River. To get the right camera height, they aren't done from the shoreline, either. It can take a pretty long lens. I want to shoot a photo of Manhattan from a quite elevated shopping centre parking lot in Queens. The lot is well back of the River. I'm hoping that a Fujinon C 600mm f/11.5, maybe in 4x5 rather than 8x10, will do the trick.
I have a home in the community in the attached photo. To shoot the photo, I had to go out to our lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. I used a Mamiya 7II 6x7 with 150mm lens. Next spring, I want to make some photos, including photos that show only part of this scene, from the same spot with a 4x5 or 8x10 camera. Toyo's website says that in 8x10 I'd need a 600mm lens, such as the Fujinon C, to make the image shown in the photo. Not terribly hard to get a windless early morning, so I don't think that the bellows and shake will be a problem, but the tradeoff is often a wee bit of fog
Waterfront, low resolution 110kb version
Well, you use the tools you need to achieve the picture you have in mind. If that means system monorail cameras and long lenses, tele or not, so be it. And if there are technical problems, hopefully you have the means and the will to surmount those.
I'm aware of the challenges of tele work in large format; for a while in the '90s I tried emulating Mr. Wolf's pictures of NYC. I rented a 500mm Nikkor-T and put it on my 4x5 Zone VI... results were variable at best, with some successes. But I lacked long-term access to both the city and access to the kind of vantage points that Wolf had, so the 'project' went nowhere, really. I'd still like to own a really long lens like that Nikkor, hasn't happened yet, but I do have ideas about pictures to be made... perhaps someday.
Different tools for different needs and goals.
LF tele is often technically challenging due to the physical size of the outfit. Add to this, stability of that outfit makes ALL the difference with image results. While telephoto design LF lenses DO aid by reducing the camera extension/bellows draw, trying to achieve a vibration free and stable set up with any LF tele outfit will always be a difficult challenge at best. This is one of the fundamental facts of why uber performance LF tele lenses are more "red hearing" than absolute image performance performance. Been there, done this with very mixed results over the decades of making LF images.
IMO, the better solution could be moving to a smaller image recording format. Of all the small format optics used over the decades, the Canon 300mm f2.8 remains one of the all time faves for tele images. Still heavy and bulky, this version offers image stabilization allowing slower shutter speeds to be used with good blur control. Full aperture of f2.8 aids lots in this as does a digital camera with very good low light performance. This allows making images not possible with any LF outfit. On flip, tele LF images can have a special and unique quality to them. Neither is better than the other, they are inherently different with both excellent and awful in their own ways..
In all cases be it 800mm + for LF or smaller image recorder devices/methods compression of atmospheric particles, lighting conditions and LOTs more WILL impact the image recorded in various ways.
Another sample image.
Bernice
Fuji's GFX digital medium format cameras are starting to look interesting. They've brought the cost of playing way down. These cameras are starting to be characterised as "large format", which may come from Fuji's marketing line "More Than Full Frame". I don't think that they're quite there, but the next generation may be very enticing.
I don't fully understand references to 300mm lenses for 35mm.
In terms of AoV, A 300mm f/2.8 for 35mm provides a different perspective that one might want an 800mm f/12 for 8x10. Something like a Sigma 105mm f/1.4 (or Otus 100mm f1.4 or Nikon 105mm f/1.4) both in terms of potential depth of field and angle of view.
AOV alone is not a good way to make lens focal length -vs- film/imager size as lens focal length remains the lens focal length.
Or the 800mm lens will always remain a 800mm lens, 105mm lens remains a 105mm lens with their innate difficulties/advantages. This is one of the many reasons why larger film/imagers are at a disadvantage for longer than normal or tele lenses. Or why the 300mm on "35mm" comparison or discussion.
Bernice
Oh gosh, long tele work, with respect to 4x5 format at least, was routine for people like Shirakawa under extreme conditions in multiple expeditions to the Himalayas and Karakorum. Vittoria Sella did it much larger format long before, and got that damn antique ULF camera to nearly 23,000 feet altitude once. And there are distinctly better ways to stabilize even a long monorail than that convoluted setup Wolf used, which would be hell to set up in difficult weather or terrain. That I can assert from ample real experience.
But I will admit that if I'm in a hurry or the wind is just so nasty that I'm worried about my LF gear not even surviving the session, and becoming a kite instead, I'll resort to my P67 with a 300EDIF instead. Still, there's nothing quite as satisfying as a long shot with LF to work with in the darkroom, with 8x10 being especially nice. I got away with several of those shots last week with my Norma and a solid Ries tripod in constant wind; completely loupe crisp. Took a lot of patience. A lighter field camera and CF tripod would have simply blown over repeatedly. I can't imagine risking an expensive MF digital camera under such circumstances, even if one of those ever does hypothetically come close to LF image quality. And C'mon, bringing in 35mm options into this conversation??? That's not apples versus oranges, but pineapples versus sesame seeds.
Some may be interested in watching this July 2017 Luminous Landscape interview with Ed Burtynsky. He talks about his transition from 4x5 and 8x10 to medium format digital. He started in 2005, using both film and digital, and moved fully to digital in 2010. He thinks that a 60MP Hasselblad performs better than 4x5 film. When this interview took place, he had just acquired a 100MP Hasselblad and was hoping that it would match 8x10. It may be useful to know that Burtynsky is quite knowledgeable about image quality, having founded Toronto Image Works in 1986. For a long time, Toronto Image Works was what made it financially possible for him to pursue photography.
Burtynksy also did an interview with PetaPixel in 2017 in which he said this:
"What I’m doing now is beyond 4×5 with the 60 megapixel. I would say the 60 put me in a 5×7 format, and the 100 will bring me to 8×10."
As I said in post #35, I'm interested in where Fuji is going with its GFX cameras. Burtynsky's views on medium format digital, in relation to Hasselblad at least, are what got me interested in these Fuji cameras.
If one wants context for the Luminous Landscape and PetaPixel interviews, The New Yorker published an essay on the projects that Burtynsky was working on at the time of these interviews, titled The Long View: Edward Burtynsky's quest to photograph a changing planet
Note: while the Luminous Landscape interview was uploaded to YouTube in 2020, it was done in 2017.
I look at the results, not the name. Burtynsky is at liberty to toot his own horn, of course, but the whole topic goes way beyond pixels; and I know craftsmen way above his skill level and pay grade that can't begin to equal their own former 8x10 film results, or even 4x5, with any kind of digital capture. Burtynsky has an interesting manner of composition, and handles color quite well RELATIVE to a certain look he tries to achieve, which might be very different from one's own qualitative expectations. I hardly consider him the apogee of color printmaking skill; but he apparently gets what he needs. What might work better for him personally at the moment should not be taken as a rote prescription. Take it with a grain of salt. There are plenty of contradictory opinions to weigh if one is contemplating going down that same road - pros and cons every direction you look, with a LOT of money at stake, especially factoring just how much faster anything fragile and software dependent depreciates.
But if inkjet printing is the endpoint, that is the great equalizer in terms of a lower standard common denominator. I have a friend whose name I won't mention who chimes in (not here) with that same kind of line as Burtynsky - why? because he's paid to do so, even though to this day his digital prints, as good as they are, aren't equal to his own earlier darkroom color prints. Don't ever underestimate the incentive of endorsement rewards. It can be part of an overall business model. And note how people often change their tune depending on who is interviewing them - in this case, it's specifically a digital blurb. It's a game. One plays football with a football, and differently than basketball, if they want to succeed. But don't get fooled into thinking it's all the same game.
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