Over the last couple of months, I've been getting to know a photographer called Adam French who lives in the same city as me. French is a photographer who primarily shoots with a large format film camera. I was utterly blown away by some of the work he produced, and I asked him if he'd be interested in working with us on a YouTube video.
In the video linked above, we decided to compare a 50-megapixel full-frame camera, the Canon 5DS R, to a large format 4x5 film camera. The lenses we used for the comparison were the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art on the Canon versus a 180mm f/2.9 lens on the 4x5 camera. If you're interested in what the equivalents are, then the large-format lens would be somewhat similar to a 50mm lens with an aperture of around f/0.8 on a full-frame camera. This kind of depth of field is simply ridiculous, and currently, nothing like this exists for any digital camera produced by any of the well-known manufacturers. Even if you're shooting with a digital medium format camera, it simply isn't possible to produce that kind of depth of field natively.
Check out the full video to see the kind of results you can produce with large format compared to a high-resolution full frame camera. You can find all the images here.
Nice video. I have a couple of 4x5 cameras to restore (Graflex/SpGraphic types). Not on top of my to-do list, but I want to play with some large format.
I’ve been shooting my 4x5 almost exclusively for the past year, and it creates beautiful results. Is it for everyone? No. It’s a pain in the a$$ to lug around, but it’s a labor of love for me.
I would’ve liked to see more of that tripod the large format was on, that thing looked rock solid.
I would love to try and learn large format or even medium format film but I still haven’t mastered digital, it’s so interesting to me though.
I'm so jealous of that tripod Adam has. He got it for FREE...
It's a beast and I want it lol.
For Kicks .. Get your cameras from Route 66.. This is the Real Look of Large Format !!
Nice concept- get the 4x5 "look", skip the negative and go straight to digitization. May need some optical tricks...
Is the ground glass still in place? That would make it more interesting but challenging.
Its a Halloween Gag .. Digital Sensors are not very good at off axis illumination.
bummer. I do see that Fotodiox does sell 4x5 adaptors though.
Could a lens cast calibration work? We normally use that method when shooting with tech cameras on Phase Backs.
Too many calibration values to be practical in my opinion.
It’s just s gag .. Trick or Treat .. Trick !!
Ah ok thats a shame. Thank you for clarifying :-).
I think the experiment did prove that Tilt and Swing is DOA on present technology sensors.
But ... if sensors were on a flexible medium ... you could have Tilt Swing and maybe even roll film sensors.
Thanks for doing that test! Now I REALLY want one of those 4x5 cameras, especially with the instant film.
Looking at the image download links you provided, the 5DS-R pictures definitely seem to have greater detail and overall technical quality than the 4x5 film camera... which is interesting to note because many people have asked if modern cameras can outdo medium & large format film cameras for large landscape prints, and the answer seems to be "yes"... though I still wonder about 8x10 film. But the 4x5 film camera, especially with that shallow DoF, has an amazing look that you just can't reproduce with the Canon rig.
Usman did say that the lens used on the 4x5 is not really sharp, so I would not judge based on that comparison.
Thank you so much for the comment, Tony. I'd say that it depends on the lens. The lenses we used on the 4x5 were super soft and not really designed to produce highly detailed images. I think with an actual sharp lens large format may be able to produce significantly better and more detailed images. Having said that I think lenses like the ones from the Otus series may outperform any Large format lens so not a clear cut answer, unfortunately.
What might be useful to do is to compare and test large-format against full-frame with some sharp lenses to see what kind of results each can produce at their respective best. I'll see if I can do that next.
Why did you use lenses that you knew were soft in some kind of comparo about large format being unrivaled?
Because most of not all of the lenses that are super sharp don’t have apertures as wide as f2.9 which would results in a very different type of comparison. I wasn’t trying to produce the sharpest most detailed image I was discussing the kind of look you can produce.
I might however do a comparison to show the the kind of details you can produce with large format. Let me see if I can get something going for that.
The title of your article is "Large Format Is Still Completely Unrivaled: Canon 5DS R Versus 4x5 Large Format Film" without really explaining what you mean by "unrivaled" .
Then you used oddball lenses, (fwiw lenses I never heard of or used when I was shooting large format) vs a high quality modern lens for the canon.
So the comparo, I am not sure what it was about, creative focus fall off? Why not then use equally oddball lenses on the the Canon like one of the Lensbaby lenses or a pinhole lens to get some equally oddball result.
Or better yet treat the two cameras like the different tools that they are and and not do the clickbaity title and show what kind of funky stuff you can get using funky lenses on a 4x5. You seem to doing alternative process with the 4x5, and regular run of the mill photos with the canon, then declaring the 4x5 to be unrivaled.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well can you produce images with full frame that have apertures of around f0.7 or wider in terms of equivalent depth of field?
I talk about aspects like the medium format look and based on that the context is quite clear.
Also I shot with the smallest version of large format. I’m kind of scratching the surface here. If you shoot with an 8x10 with more regular lenses that have f5.6 apertures that’s still equivalent to about f0.7.
In your video, are the the full lengths shots of Lucy under the tree supposed to be similar? If you look at how the trees and the river(?) in the far background are different sizes, while she is more or less the same size, it looks to me that the 50mm on the DSLR is too wide of a lens and maybe an 85mm 1.2 or a 105mm 1.4 shot wide open would have been a closer comparison to the "look" from the 4x5. The background would have more blur than with the 50mm, closer matching the 4x5.
I am still not sure about what unrivaled means in this story. Is it the blur and falloff of focus? Resolution? Torque?
PS when you talk about the "medium format look" it would be good to show examples as the 6x6 or 6x7 MF film look is different from the MF digital look. I think sometimes people confuse the two.
I get the feeling you skimmed through the video. I discuss a bunch of the points you bring up.
I watched it a couple times...I guess I'm missing something.
Luminosity masks fixes dynamic range discrepancies unfortunately, no monitors or printing techniques are capable of rendering, tilt shift lens and stacked panoramas can overload some computers.
Yea we had to scale images to 100mp just to make them manageable. Scanning at full resolution would have been way too much to handle and overkill too.
Fashion shooters in the late 80's mid 90s did beautiful work on large format...and its pretty close to being a lost art. Paolo Roversi here....large format....long before photoshop existed.
An excellent image but I'll bet it's had a lot of darkroom manipulation - old school photoshop!
Oh sure....everything from over-developing the film itself ( that was an art of its own back in the day...push processing) plenty of dodge and burning...contrast filters in the enlarger...paper choice, toners. Everyone worked on their darkroom "style" just as much as modern day editing "style".
Damn I miss working with film now!!
Yes increased focal length is a factor in the difference here, but so is retro-focal distance, the reason large format cameras produce such shallow dof is greatly in part to the much larger distance between the lens and the film plane. This is most noticeable with 8x10, and is technically a 'flaw' or limitation, though beautiful...
I would call it a "feature", but your descriptions are not incorrect. It is this "feature" that led some early/mid 20th century photographers to create the "f64" group! I guess to them, it was more of a "flaw" (i.e., trying to achieve great depth of field with large format cameras).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_f/64
I do think some photographers work around this at least partially using very long lenses (no retro-focus though). I see this occasionally. Not sure how it turns out, but may be similar to large format (looks like a large zoom- maybe to 300mm or more on a full frame Canon DSLR):
I owned two large format cameras and barely shot with either because they were so heavy and bulky; pulling everything from your pack to get your camera out sucks. All else aside, a camera you do not use is absolutely inferior.
First of all, nice job. I wish that you had included some other elements of your comparison. For instance, you did not discuss which film you used. There are still many great films out there that produce excellent results. For me while the large format had excellent results; I noticed a slightly yellow cast on the shots that I wish had been neutralized. The other question is how did you scan the LF film. That would be interesting information to have shared. You mentioned briefly that you used jpgs of the LF. My question is why they were not scanned to uncompressed TFF files. Again, it was great experiment and it clearly demonstrated the look and feel with film that is not achieved in digital, but I would have liked to have heard more about the process... Thanks, and all the best!
One factor not taken into consideration is the difference in the optical formulas. The older lens designs had much smoother bokeh than modern lenses. Compare the bokeh from an 85mm f/1.4 Nikkor G against the 85mm f/1.4 Ai and you'll see what I mean. Aspheric lenses seem to have something to do with that. If you put that 4x5 lens on the Canon body, you'll get similar bokeh.
A Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f4 Sonnar (1937) for Contax RF just arrived today (e-bay auction). Just tested it on my Fujifilm XT-2.
True story .. and that's just 4x5 ... now imagine what you can get 8x10 film with a goooood drum scan ... no digital MF camera can reach that... shoot I have a few 4x5 images I shot in a beauty makeup shoot that I should send to lab for development .. hopefully they are in focus. Getting things in focus is the HARD part with large format.
Shot NCAA basketball in the '50s with 4x5 speed graphic set at f/11, 127mm f/4.7 lens, with big old strobe which ran on two wet cells (everything it lit was in focus) locked focus on the basket, never changed, had 12 film holders in a bag for the entire game. Shot at 1/400 (I think) which made the background black. None of this modern stuff where you can see your dentist in the stands in the action shots. Had to hustle the stuff back to the lab after the game, develop the film, find two good ones, print with wet neg, take the 8x10 prints to the paper's office, where the sports editor would throw one print in the trash, put the other on this drum thing which sent the image to the printer for the morning paper. Sports editor liked the stuff & signed the pay chit, so ok with me. Now I'm 80 and the lube in the shutter is like the stuff in my arteries. And it was heavy, but I was young and strong. At least if a shoot was outside I didn't have to lug the strobe. The stack of film holders was bigger than the camera. If things really got hot and heavy, I had a changing bag where I could reload the holders. Hardly ever did, too much trouble. Most everything hand held. Only buildings and mountains held still long enough for a tripod shot. Don't miss it one bit. Rather shoot my D850.
Saw a museum exhibit couple years ago. Army and RR guys out west in the 1880's, Big glass plates like 16 or 20 inch, which they lugged around on mules, then sent back to Washington. Man, those guys were photographers!
developed them on the spot...then sent them back to Washington
oh wow shooting action with a LF ... looks like it was kind of zone focusing so that's a LITTLE help BUT not like these new cameras that take 20 frames in one second ... you had to press the shutter in the exact right time ... wow
It was really like a point and shoot. I knew where the zone of focus was, and didn't shoot out of it. Sports editor liked action around the basket. I gave him what he liked as he paid. Aimed with the wire sports finder. Flip up hole in the rear, with wire pull up frame on the lens carrier. The jolt of juice in the flash made a lovely pop, as well as the snap of the spring on reversing the film holder. Can still remember the sounds after 60 years.
AND the other super cool thing with LF is the tilt shift you can do to get creative.
while i kept my 4X5 gear and have been digital for the last 5 years i am thinking about shooting and scanning for supeer large files and extreem resolution. There are a few photographiers doing this and they produce large extreemly high resolution images. Huge files too. When I shoot 4X5 mainly landscape i ended up do a single image per shoot. This was usually shooting at Dawn waiting for the right light!
Usman Dawood Great video, enjoyed it, thank you. I have a 4x5 and have been using it for maybe 1.5 years now, still an incredible amount to learn! Wondering if you could share with me where the photographer Adam French got his 4x5 polaroid film. I think that would come in handy but I haven't been able to locate any. Appreciate it if you can, anyways thanks!
Great video.I'm so interested in working with large format but there simply aren't enough hours in the day. Gives me something to consider
The link is not working for me :(
huh... I just checked and it looks like someone deleted the whole folder. Well, that was nice of them.
I'll upload a new one and send you a link.
low res version in the meantime.
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqMU3QFCgyGIobAq-vw9gS6bnXUbrw?e=OevYHA
How were the 4x5s scanned? I'm guessing your comparisons were made on a screen.
Or did you make prints from both cameras to be compared side by side?