Peculiarly, I found emails in my spam folder relating to these posts...
Originally posted by Femto1969 Street, I've taken some handheld candid portraits that have made me a believer! ISO 400 and a wide aperture make shutter speeds high enough for very sharp images. You should take yours off the legs and swing it around every once in awhile!
Street is very different to the precision required (or desired) of landscape photography. I would like to see even the most experienced 67 user handheld a P67 at 40 seconds within the gloom of a rainforest while a battalion of leeches makes a beeline for his armpits!
Originally posted by tuco There a lot of variables that go into shooting a Pentax 6x7 handhold. The wider the lens the easier it is on camera shake, focus and more DOF. Obviously for handhold street style shooting a medium format camera composition, mood and subject are way more important attributes than ultimate sharpness of the image. If you are trying to squeeze the last 2% of image quality out a medium format, perhaps just go to the next level of sheet film.
As for LF and the 2% (it is closer to 1%), I also have an Ebony SV45Ti and really, the resolution gain over a crisp, perfectly focused 67 image is at best modest, and pitifully, too often over-stated with zealous, vehement enthusiasm by exponents, more for the "craftiness" of the [4x5] format than refined technical proficiency and format comparison (remembering also that in the 1980s medium format was actually "large format"!).
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Originally posted by Femto1969 Street, I've taken some handheld candid portraits that have made me a believer! ISO 400 and a wide aperture make shutter speeds high enough for very sharp images. You should take yours off the legs and swing it around every once in awhile!
Yes, ISO400+ (even 3200)
handheld is easily achievable with street-style, but it is not with mine (enclosed landscape) where Tvs are drawn out way beyond 30 seconds (often a minute...) at ISO50 (and recently Adox CMSII at ISO20!!), and prints are very large, not 6x4 postcards! Street snapping is relaxing and spontaneous, to be sure. Landscape can be fraught, tedious and an exercise in mental gymnastics that can leave folks drained and struggling to go back and do it again. I don't like being bitten by leeches, but it happens every time. I also get a numb face, runny nose, watery eyes and asthma attacks!!
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Originally posted by CreationBear That's some "second option," Silent Street. A question: how often do you find yourself wishing you had "movements" when out and about with your SLR? I can imagine a bit of Scheimpflug would be a great way to side-step the diffraction issues, and having the equivalent of T/S would be a great help in a forest setting.
Short answer: not very often.
The Ebony SV45TI comes out when I want to "bend the rules" a bit; it is very, very difficult to focus in quite low ambient light conditions, and the application of movements is largely superfluous for straight-on, uncomplicated photography (if anything, rise/fall is more useful than focus manipulation). I can also resort to 35mm using Canon's TS-E 24 or 45mm lenses (which I have been using since 1995, mounted to a veteran EOS 1N first used in 1994!): much easier and quicker than LF and follow-focus confirmation is helpful for "bloody mad old coots" like me with dodgy eyes! Some of my very best images were made with the EOS 1N and TS-E lenses, a long, long time before MF and even longer before LF — I will never part company with the oldest and most reliable and memorable components of my photography system!