but moreso in patience.
Gwitif knows his cameras. Obviously it seems it knows his cameras and probably has owned or tested every medium format back out there and it seems what he wants is a 5D2 in a medium format back.
Nobody makes that, probably never will because right now medium format is the Fuji 680 of the digital world, or better put the fuji 680 that shoots with a 35mm polaroid back for previews.
When it's right it right, but in todays world the versatility is limited and the client expectations so intense it's just hard to justify the time required.
Right now we've been casting all week. Stills and Video, 150 to 180 people per day, running two sets, all web galleries must be edited and online every night.
This is Canon territory and not because it doesn't matter in a casting, actually the casting is where this project lives or dies it is just with medium format, even if it shot video and stills, it wouldn't matter because it would take another
two hours per night to process out jpegs for the galleries and right now we've working 7:30 am to 3:30 am to stay on deadline.
Now in a week we start shooting and a year or two ago this would have been a medium format job. The props are stylized but minimized, the lighting is high wattage and crafted, the location is the studio, but the shot list is off the scale.
Now here is the rub, I would love to shoot this job medium format and for 65% I could but for 35%, (the 35% that is make it or break it) I can't shoot slower, I can't work only in low iso, I can't always rely on being tethered and I can't keep changing out batteries every 3 1/2 hours.
Medium format has gotten incrementally better, but here's the rub #2. Working all week with the clients, they look at the previews coming off the camera and into the computer and say, "wow that looks beautiful" and this is just the no make up, non styled, semi lit casting and they love the quality of images they are seeing, so as much as I "want" to shoot this job a different format, even don't mind beating myself up a little I have to think is it really worth the time, the risk, the extra effort when I hear "wow that looks beautiful"?
Now on to rub #3. Medium format knows what we need, knows the price points, knows the flexibility that's required today, knows that backups are imperative and I think is try to get there, though the movement is glacial compared to 35mm. I think Hasselblad gets closest, just because they have a more detailed lcd and is trying to do something about autofocus, though it is still difficult to understand why a digital back can't produce a detailed jpeg along with a raw file, or why they are stuck in 100, to 200 iso ccd land and why a frame rate of 1.2 frames a second seems monumental compared to the previous .9 fps.
The dealers on this forum talk about superior image quality and in "some" conditions they are correct, but not getting the shot, going behind schedule, making our life more difficult is not an option for a lot of paying work that is coming our way.
Now to me the biggest part of all this is Gwitif, me and a lot of people own or have owned medium format so we are predisposed to continue with it, but give the conditions we now work under, it's difficult to go that direction, even more difficult to spend may tens of thousands of dollars just to get an incremental improvement from the previous camera or digital back.
Still, this is almost a mute discussion, because medium format knows what the working professional requires . . . today, though just giving us more megapixels, taking comparison photos of brick walls, or charts doesn't do it, but as I've said before, don't ask a photographer what they want, ask the client.
BC
