Why I use medium format

There was a recent survey on DPR that asked the title question and several related ones. Some of the answers were interesting, and inspired me to write this post about my reasons.

First, some history.

I first started using medium format in 1949. I was six years old, and my mother and father gave me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. My father and I developed the film and made contact prints of the 6×6 (in those days, we called them “two and a quarter square”) negatives. There were three main attractions of this camera for me: it was cheap, it was simple, and the negatives were big enough that you could see a bit of detail in a contact print.

Then I started to use my father’s folding Zeiss medium format camera. The negs were a bit smaller — today we’d call them 645. But it had a few advantages for someone who was beginning to learn photography: the lens focused (but there was no rangefinder; you had to guess the distance), and you could set the shutter and f-stop. It also had a better lens, but that didn’t matter when making contact prints.

When I went away to high school, I used my father’s borrowed Zeiss folder for make images for the school newspaper, but I soon split my photography between 35mm and 4×5. Medium format wasn’t sufficiently compelling for me to stretch my exceedingly modest budget far enough to buy into a third system. I did borrow 6×6 twin-lens reflexes for some assignments: mostly Rolleicords, Rolleiflexes, and Minolta Autocords.

I continued to borrow MF cameras from time to time in college and later, but I didn’t buy another MF camera until 1980, when I built a darkroom (with an enlarger this time), and, after trying Mamiyas, Bronicas, and Rolleis, I bought a Hasselblad 500-something-or-other. I used Hasselblads a lot for the next 30 years. When I switched over to digital capture, I used a Kodak back for my Hasselblad cameras.

Then Hasselblad announced the H series cameras, which at the beginning had one foot in the palm camp, and one in the digital one. It seemed like a natural evolution from my earlier ‘blads, so I went all in. In the 2000s, gradually I used the Hasselblads less and less, preferring either smaller cameras like Nikons and Sonys, and larger ones like view cameras with my Betterlight 72x96mm back. The H-series lenses were just too big and heavy for a lot of what I wanted to do.

I watched the transition from rapidly depreciating and hugely expensive Leaf, Hassy, and Phase One 645ish cameras to 33x44mm sensors with interest. I was tempted by the Pentax 33x44mm camera, but it was just too big for me, and it seemed that Pentax wasn’t serious about making lenses optimized for that sensor. Then Hasselblad announced the first of the X-series cameras, and nearly simultaneously Fuji started marketing the GFX cameras. I had a ‘blad X1D on order for a while, but Hasselblad had trouble filling it, and I bought a GFX 50S. I thought it was a great camera. The body wasn’t much bigger than some of my 24x36mm cameras. The lenses were, but they were manageable compared to the H-series Hasselblad lenses. I thought the GF lenses were great. When Fuji came out with the 100 MP GFXs, I was a happy camper.

However, at no point did I stop using my 24x36mm cameras. Some were a lot smaller, the autofocus was better, there were lenses that I couldn’t get for the GFX cameras, and that would have been too heavy had they been available.

When I used MF cameras with film, the motivation was to get images that held lots of detail and exhibited little grain at sizes larger than 8×10, and smaller than 20×24 inches. Actually, I never thought that 35mm negatives looked very good at 8×10 inches. That required an 8x enlargement, and I thought that quality started to suffer at enlargements above 4x. I thought that some 35mm images could be successfully printed at larger than 8×10, but those were images for which grain and sharpness weren’t that important. There were some film emulsions like Agfa 25, Ektar 25, and Tech Pan, which could tolerate greater enlargement, but they had other drawbacks.

Digital photography moved the goalposts. When the 16 MP Canon 24x36mm camera came out in the mid-aughts, lots of photographers replaced their MF film cameras with them. Then 24 MP cameras became the standard. Nikon and Sony introduced 36 MP, 45 MP, and 62 MP cameras whose image quality was firmly in 4×5 film territory. The 100 MP MF cameras offered still better quality, but what we could get from 24×36 mm sensors fully satisfied most image uses.

If you are not light-limited, you can still get higher quality images from 33×44 and larger sensors than you can from full frame ones. But the subjects and presentations that require that level of quality are becoming a smaller and smaller subset of all photographic subjects and uses.

Today, I use medium format cameras for less than half of my photography. I use them mostly in the studio. I don’t use them for portraits; I prefer the Z8 for that. The Nikon 58/1.4, 105/1.4, and Plena 135/1.8 are marvelous lenses. I wouldn’t say that they’re better then the GF 110/2, but I don’t think they’re worse for portrait usage, and they offer some rendering advantages in some circumstances. The lower resolution of the Z8 as compared to the GFX 100x isn’t an issue in any portrait presentation I am likely to encounter.

I have two 100 MP Hasselblad X-series cameras. I find that they have a much more constricted usage envelope than the new GFX 100 MP cameras, mostly because of their markedly inferior autofocus. So they mostly adorn my gear cabinet. In retrospect I consider them poor purchases.

If I choose a medium format camera for a job today, I do it because I think there is a chance that I’ll be able to print the images large enough that the extra image quality will matter. Most of the time that remains only a possibility, because it seems that hardly anybody wants prints that large, at least from me. Still, old habits die hard.

I think of my final image usage as a print, which is why I continue to pursue MF image quality sometimes. Displays have much lower resolution. A 4K display can image about 8 million pixels. When 8K displays get more common, they’ll be able to handle images slightly larger than 32 megapixels. There is something to be said for oversampling at capture time with respect to the ultimate display resolution, especially with Bayer color filter arrays on the sensor. But I expect that we’ll have 100+ megapixel 24x36mm cameras before 8K displays are common, so that’s not going to be a constraint.

At this point, somebody usually brings up cropping. My answer to that is that is you routinely crop in both dimensions, you are using the wrong gear for the subject. However, I have the ability to choose my gear based on the project, and not everybody enjoys that option.