Tuomas Xi
Newbie
Having been shooting RAW with an entry-level Canon DSLR for the last couple of years, with fairly thorough digital PP and DAM procedures, I feel that moving to a half-film-half-digital workflow could be interesting. I've got some ideas and questions below, and I'd really appreciate if anyone with some experience or views on any of this could give a comment.
Regards,
- I shoot mostly modern architecture for personal use and for fun. I travel a bit, and visiting interesting buildings and spaces is often the main motivation for going on a trip in the first place. I've appreciated the small size and lightness of my DSLR from this point of view, even though I'm ready to lug more weight around with me as well. Recently I've been using a Slik Pro 500 tripod+ a pan head, and spirit level on the trips.
- Workflow
Shoot film, scan, do digital PP and apply digital asset management to saving and archiving the results? Sounds OK to me otherwise, but there would be the issue of managing the archiving and organising the negatives or slides too, which is double work then. However, on a typical trip I shoot some 1000-2000 frames with my DSLR, just because it's possible and to make sure i get at least some photos that are bearable to look at. Even though I've made the PP and DAM things quite efficient and automated in Adobe Camera Raw, iView Mediapro and Photoshop, it still takes a lot of time to rank and edit so many files. With film this would be very different to start with, and this is something I feel strongly about: the process of shooting film would perhaps force me to work more carefully when actually shooting and it would also let me concentrate more on polishing the results in the PP stage and make it easier and quicker to organise and archive the results. All this sounds like an attractive way of doing photography to me. This touches also on the subject of the camera: for example is it easy to compose the image through the viewfinder (it's awfully small and dim in my current DSLR) , the ease of use etc. Of course, I could just try to be more disciplined and restrained when shooting with my DSLR, but... - Zeiss Ikon vs. Mamiya 7 II vs. other MF cameras:
- ZI with the 18mm Distagon+external viewfinder or the 21mm f/2.8 Biogon+external VF seems like a very attractive 35 mm RF set for my purposes: small, light, high quality, almost reasonably priced in some parts of the world. It would possibly leave the door open to digital RF in the future as well, if such cameras continue to be produced after the M8 (and if I'd get rich).
- I've seen some drum scanned images shot with a Mamiya 7 II + N80 lens and the results were just amazing, especially to a crop-sensor-DSLR user like me. As this is a reasonably portable camera, it seems like a good choice as well, except for the fact that the Zeiss ZM line of lenses offers 15 and 18 mm lenses, whereas the shortest equivalent for Mamiya 7 II is 21 mm (the N43 lens). For some reason I'm a bit skeptical about tilt/shift-lenses on sub-LF cameras, but that's absolutely down to the fact that I've never used them, or read about the subject adequately. I just have a feeling that they work best on large format equipment?
- How about some non-RF MF cameras? They would offer the advantage of high quality scanned results together with more accurate viewfinders than those used in RF cameras perhaps?
Regards,
