You've mentioned this runway gig before and I'm not sure what shows your shooting with a phase/mamiya, but at the venues at the Louvre, Fiera and Bryant park, (and the smaller venues ) those guys and girls that work the risers are some very serious individuals and none of them would think about shooting anything that doesn't work at many frames a second, usually with a 1.3 or 1.5 cropped camera and one fast zoom lens, usually two bodies and lenses they can almost work simultaneously.
Actually, to segway this into the NY Times thread on this forum, the runway photographs have for years taken the place of commissioned shoots of the designers seasonal collection for look books . . . to the point that those little 10 and 12 mpx images are often retouched repurposed and used for international advertising, in store (still and motion), packaging, tags, outdoor as well as all forms of editorial.
BC
All that points are absolutely true.
A 1D MK 3 or 4 is a perfect tool.
Recently, I spoke with a well known fashion photographer that told me that it's been a long time now he only shoot Canon for all the reasons exposed here.
No hassle, responsive and does a more than usable output for campaigns in different mediums. I saw some big prints (heavily PP), they did look great.
When people in the studio knows how to, you can do a lot with these cropped sensors.
2) We were looking at his old website made with flash, and he asked me if I could design something that would work for Iphone, Ipad etc...
Adobe will release anyway a "flash" integrated with HP, and it means that flash is not dead yet, but there is a great concern about that and people want to display with this mediums now.
3) 3D will be IMHO the next step.
I've always liked much more the MF, but for a lot of applications, this is going to be (talking in the state of current gears) less and less used. I do not see any Pentax 645 D for these kind of works, neither a Leica S2.
Simply because megapixels is not the only parameter.
To be honest, I've been amazed how I could enlarge from Raw file a 12MP Pentax KX (entry level camera) file without practicaly no loosing IQ to 18MP-20MP at 300ppp.
No problem for catalogues, covers etc..These new sensors are really much better than what was available some years ago.
Fred.