A Novice's Medium Format Experience

Well, I’m glad to report that my venture and transition into Medium Format photography (Mamiya 7II 6x7) has met with success.  I sent my first roll in – with fingers and toes crossed – for development a few days ago and the results were surprisingly impressive indeed.   Of course this doesn’t make me an ‘expert’ as there is still quite a bit to learn about the various technical aspects of photography, but with the first prints turning out so well – composition, colours, exposure, sharpness, etc – it is indeed quite a motivational resource especially since i was playing with long exposures in the course of night-time shooting...no wasted/bad shots...all nighttime shots turned out well:) (i'll put some of the photos up once i get it scanned.)

I know I was being ambitious as I had spent only a couple of weeks on digital photography with my Ricoh GX100, before moving on to a 35mm Nikon F4 for another couple of weeks, and finally taking the plunge into medium format for the past couple of weeks.  The most important lesson here, which I reiterated to Vanessa and Sim, is that, ‘if wo/man can make it, we can learn it’.  As lecturers were inclined to saying in my uni (university of central Lancashire, uk), ‘Genius is 10% talent, and 90% hard work’, and I’m inclined to think that it is the latter that produces the former.  But this doesn’t render my 35mm film camera redundant as the lens range for medium format 6x7 is not wide enough – literally and figuratively speaking.  Hence, my Nikon F4 (picked up for $480sgd/160stirling) comes in handy when I want to shoot ‘fisheye’, when I want to do immediate shots of the guy who’s just about to stop picking his nose in a second, fast moving action, or when I don’t want to print as big as the MF allows. (shooting MF is about 3 times more expensive as one can only take about 10 shots per roll that costs the same as a 35mm roll of film.   

Hence, the moral of this episode of the story is that YOU can do it too, even though you’re a novice at it all like myself.  And the quality is much better as well.  Some have stated that an MF would be equivalent to a 100megapixel camera.  However, they did not say if the larger frame size of the MF camera compared to 35mm digital makes this figure much higher.  The detail, dynamic range, sharpness, etc, is visibly much greater as well.  Of course, I must add, that the purpose of going into MF is not because ‘it is there’, because you want to show up the chans-next-door, or because you are a gadget-kid with too much money, but because it enables one to print really large without compromising the quality as is the case, comparatively speaking, with 35mm digital/film cameras, and it is a very much cheaper than the former of the two as well.  I would recommend it to those who want to make photography their paid or artistic profession and who need or want to print large.

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