A sense of purpose
During the last three months, I’ve been busy doing a lot of different photography through travel, assignments and personal projects. Whilst some of this has been a continuation of establishing where I’m going with medium format photography, regular (full-frame) digital and a ton of film photography has heavily featured in my work too.
Everything in my photography kit and workflow has to have a place and a sense of purpose. Exploring new technologies and formats is also a lot of fun and part of the journey which has helped me to compartmentalise different kit and formats into specific applications. Understanding how my kit works and where it is best applied, allows me to fulfil my own sense of purpose and just get on with the important bit, taking photos.
Medium Format
Medium format cameras utilise much larger sensors or film planes to capture more information. My digital medium format camera creates monster 102 mega pixel images that are 200Mb in size. My medium format film camera has a 6cm x 6cm film plane which is huge compared to 35mm film and there are only 12 photos per film versus 36 on standard 35mm film roll. A larger sensor or film plane enables the photographer to capture incredible levels of detail (resolution).
Continuing on my medium format journey, I took another trip up to Northern Scotland with the Hasselblad and managed to grab a few nice landscape and panoramic shots.
Because I was heading straight up to Scotland after photographing a vintage car race in Northamptonshire, I had the Hasselblad with me so I used it for a few shots over the weekend. I applied one of my film render presets to the final images. I noticed straight away that RAW files on the Hasselblad were really good straight out of camera and needed very little by way of editing. Sony images by comparison usually need a fair bit of work for the right look.
Vintage Cars and the hotrodders in medium format
High resolution Landscapes (Scotland, Gateshead, Wye Valley and Bath)
Film
Typically, I shoot 35mm film with either 24 or 36 exposures per roll. I like colour and black and white and particularly enjoy matching a film characteristic to a particular style or subject matter.
One of my favourite subjects for film is vintage cars and motorbikes. With nothing much newer than about 1940 it works particularly well with the characterful and grainy look of some films.
I take pictures at these type of events to capture the scene as I saw it with my own eye. For this, a 50mm lens is ideal. It affords me a good deal of control over depth of field so I can blur backgrounds if I want to and there is very little distortion that you get on wide angle lenses.
My trusty Leica MP fitted with the 50mm f1.4 was loaded with Kodak Tri-X, Rollei Retro 400S and 80S and Ilford FP4 black and white films. Vintage cars also really suit the grainy and high contrast Harman Phoenix 200 which gives a delicious retro feel that just works for the hotrod scene, so I shot a couple of rolls of that too.
Afer MPH, I loaded up some Kodak Portra 160 colour film which I used to document a week travelling around Bristol, Monmouthshire and the Wye Valley with friends who came to stay with us.
Various Black and White Films of the Vintage Cars
Harman Phoenix - Glorious retro colour tones for vintage cars:
Porta 160 - Professional film from Kodak
Full Frame Digital
Full-Frame Digital refers to a 35×24mm sensor size which is my usual digital configuration when not shooting medium format. My cameras all give variable resolution from 18 to 60 megapixels which means I can tailor the file sizes of the images to suit the application and required level of detail. The advantage with digital full-frame is that a 28mm, or 35mm or 50mm lens works natively. There is no crop-factor involved to work out the effective field of view which is the case with other cameras with smaller sensors. Full-frame cameras have historically been considered professional cameras, but nowadays there is a lot of call for them in the enthusiast market too.
I used the Sony A7RV with the pro-grip which houses 2 batteries for extra shots for the bulk of the car pictures. It’s my go-to rig for any kind of professional shoot where the end result and efficiency are top priority. I almost exclusively used the 50mm f1.4 GMaster lens, one of my favourite Sony Primes which is perfectly suited to this kind of work. It affords me creative depth of field control (the ability to blur backgrounds), but also minimises distortion which is assocciated with wide angle lenses which makes cars and bikes in particular look ‘stretched’. 50mm sees the world similar to the human eye.
The Hotrod guys love Black and white images and I have created a standard preset for them which gives a nice contrasty look. I can also drop a little digital grain into the images for a nice film-inspired look.
Another higher profile professional shoot in London also saw the Sony A7RV pressed into service but this time with the venerable 24-70f2.8 GMaster lens which is superbly accurate and versatile for the that kind of work. As it was a client shoot, I can’t post images of it here.
Finally, meeting up with my friend Tom, who single handedly built the Leica Community around Bristol, I took the Leica M11 and went for a walk around in Bath doing street photography. Something I used to do a lot of but I am a little out of practice at the moment. It’s good to see I can still do it, but I’m definitely rusty.
Vintage Cars & Bikes shot on the Sony
Street Photography shot with the Leica M11
My favourite things…
Photography can be a complicated subject and with it there can be lots of complicated equipment. My favourite things are the simple pleasures like this stainless coffee pot which make just 1 cup of delicious Italian coffee for me every single day.
Can you guess what is my favourite camera? The clue is in the picture…
My favourite coffee pot for one cup.
… My favourite camera is the Leica MP film camera and if I could choose just one lens, then it would be the 50mm f1.4 Summilux which spends most of its time on that camera. If I could use that camera for everything and a 50mm lens then I surely would.
However, this article is about a sense of purpose, shooting film is not great for quick images (especially in colour), but I can turn black and white around in about 30 minutes. It is however a lot of work and doesn’t work for single images.
To that end, this picture was actually taken on the Sony A7RV with the 50mm f1.4 GM. It’s super convenient, fast, accurate with the focus and absolutely brilliant at getting the image I want quickly. In this case, I applied one of my film presets that I created for the Sony… this at least enables me to enjoy film style images which I think are pretty convincing. So, whilst there is a fair degree of overlap between different cameras, and the best camera is always the one you have with you, I do try to use the best tool for the job, which sadly isn’t always my favourite film camera. Everything else is about options, but yes if asked, the Sony could actually do it all in a pinch even if the experience is a little clinical.