----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom C" Subject: RE: Film vs Digita, was: lRe: Pentax is Dying?
> You are correct... I have never done LF firsthand, or MF for that matter. > Here's the thing... let's say my personal "Keeper shots/Shots taken Ratio" > is 1/36, or approximately one per roll (yeah, if I'm lucky). If I go out > and shoot 100 frames of 35mm, I might come back with 3 keepers. If I were > to only take 20 images on an outing I could come back with nothing worth > keeping... what % of your 4 x 5 shots are throwaway? My keeper ratio is as follows (more or less): digital: 1 in I haven't got there yet in 4500 exposures. 35mm: probably a couple per roll of 36. 120: I think I am hitting about 30%. 4x5: close to 50%. Note this is not exposures, but pictures. I bracket a lot, and shoot multiple sheets or frames of the same scene quite often. If you count actual exposures, I am probably 1 in 6 with large format. The tendency seems to be to shoot a lot more with digital, but not shoot as carefully. I suspect there is a price per picture issue at play here. At the dog show, I shot something like 800 pictures in 3 days on the digital. Had I been shooting 35mm film, I doubt I would have shot more than a couple of hundred pictures. As the size of the equipment increases, one tends to take more care with the niceties of composition (note, I do not "compose" pictures), as you tend to be working off a tripod more, and the work is slower. With 4x5, it is a real pleasure to just look at the screen, so I tend to stay under the hood a bit longer checking out the corners and whatnot where most of the unwanted surprises happen. Something else that occured to me is that the lack of a built in meter may play a part in increasing the hit ratio I experience. With the veiw camera, I am using a spot meter, which means that I am actually examining the scene several times, and have found on more than one occassion that some aspect of the scene that went unnoticed during composition has shown up during metering, be it something ugly that I missed, or even just something that wants to be taken into account with exposure and/or development. Regarding enlargability, look at the size of print you want to make. The extra size of sheet film is not really an advantage until print sizes larger than 11x14 are being made. The difference in grain is just plain not visible on the print at this size and smaller, although the tonality of sheet film is always somewhat better than 6x7, and I expect would be better still than 645, which has about half the image area as 6x7. The above relates more to black and white than colour, as B&W is much less forgiving in this regard. If you tend to shoot colour, the differences are somewhat lessened (though still there) just by the nature of the beast. A good compromise for the colour shooter might be a small field camera or one of the student monorails and a roll film back. You get a lot of the advantages of the view camera, and a lot of the convenience of the medium format camera. Wide angles are a bit of a challenge. The widest lens I have for the 4x5 is a 65mm. Quite wide on the 4x5, not so wide on 6x7 though. A blend of sheet film for the really wide stuff and roll film for more mormal and telephoto might make a nice combination, and really cut back on the number of film holders you are lugging around. I tend to backpack my equipment some distance from the car. The last thing I want is to run out of film before I run out of pictures. Unlike many lucky people, the part of the world I live in is not a landscape photographers dream. I have to travel some distance to get to the pictures I want to bring home. I don't want to drive 4 or 5 days and walk another 4 or 5 hours with 35 pounds of gear to get someplace nice, only to run out of loaded film, and have it sitting in the car, 10 miles the other way. This may colour my outlook on the number of film holders one wants to carry. I don't think it is possible to have too many film holders loaded and with you. And they do add up to a significant weight. Probably 3/4 of the weight of my field camera bag is film holders. The camera only weighs a few pounds, and the lenses don't add up to much either. The Pentax 6x7 is a rather porcine camera system. It is not lightweight. If you want lightweight, and stay with roll film, look at the 645 or 6x6 systems. They are all much more compact, and still provide a lot of imaging advantages over 35mm. I have printed a number of negatives taken with Hasselblad over the years, and I can attest that the lenses are superb. I don't know how the Pentax 645 lenses stack up, but they would have to go a long way to beat the Hassy glass. William Robb
