While I'm waiting for oncology test results to come back and to hear from my oncologist, I've been trying to keep busy in the house. It is wet, rainy and muddy outside so I have no desire to be out there right now! I've been splitting my mornings between the piano and some little photography tasks. This blog entry is about some of the recent photography testing I've been doing while stuck in the house.
For the past 12 years, my favorite camera has been my Sony a7 with its full-frame sensor. When I first purchased this camera, Sony didn't have all that many lenses available for their full-frame lineup so I quickly purchased one of their crop APS-C cameras which have sensors that are a bit smaller than the full-frame sensors. The lenses for the crop sensor are smaller, less expensive with a far more expansive choice of available lenses at the time so I was able to purchase some of the lenses available for this smaller format of sensor. These two cameras made a nice pair.
That being said, the difference in image quality between the full-frame camera and the camera with the crop APS-C sensor was significant to my eyes. Consequently, I rarely used the crop sensor camera unless I either needed to stay small and lightweight or if I needed a specific lens that, at the time, was only available for this smaller format.
In time, more and more lenses became available for the full-frame sensor so my smaller crop sensor camera was used less and less. I definitely preferred the image quality coming from the full-frame sensor so this was always my first choice if I had an appropriate lens for what I was shooting. I use the crop APS-C camera so rarely now that our granddaughter, Kenzie, probably uses this camera more often than I do!
Over the past few months, I've been building up a medium format camera kit (both digital and film) that is a much larger sensor/film format than my full-frame camera. As I mentioned, up until now my full-frame Sony camera was my favorite camera. This medium format kit is so much better than my full-frame kit that my full-frame kit now seems like the small crop APS-C kit that I had sort of abandoned in recent years! The image quality is vastly improved in medium format... the tonal qualities are significantly improved in medium format... and the images straight out of the camera require less post-processing (darkroom editing) because the feature set of controls on this camera allows for more personal customization.
I find it abundantly easy to control highlights, shadows and colors with this medium format kit. And the transition in tonal qualities as well as the smooth gradation of fall-off from sharp in-focus areas to out of focus areas amazes me every time I open one of these medium format images on my computer.
I'm still learning how to best utilize the feature set of this medium format camera but, as I said, it still amazes me every time I pick it up. In this photo below, I shot this in a pixel shift mode that produces an image that is 16,480 pixels wide by 12,360 pixels high for an image that is 203.7 megapixels in size! I'm looking forward to trying this feature on some landscape images. The theory is that this produces an image of ultra-high resolution. Admittedly, it is difficult to see this ultra-high resolution in a close-up image of a model truck but I wanted to practice shooting with this feature enabled.
For the photo below, I shot a series of photos focused at different focus points. I started with one shot focused on that front bumper... then focused slightly deeper into the composition and captured another photo... then focused slightly deeper... and again... and again. In all, I shot seven photos so that every part of the truck was in focus and then I stacked all seven images and used the in-focus areas of the truck to compress into one image. This is also a technique I look forward to using on some landscape images.
Larger sensors like I'm using on this medium format camera results in shallower depth of field. This means it can be more difficult to capture a deep landscape scene all in focus so you utilize this focus-stack technique to obtain a deeper area of focus.
For portraits, this shallower depth of field is desirable because it puts the focus on your relatively small human form. This shallower depth of field sort of obscures background distractions too so it is great for portraits where you want the focus on only your subject.
This photo below was also shot using the pixel shift feature resulting in an image that was 16,480 x 12,360...
And, below, is one last example of focus stacking a series of seven images to get all of both vehicles in sharp focus...
I'm really enjoying this new medium format camera. Another plus is that my old film lenses really shine on this camera!
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