The Medium Format Bargain Nobody Talks About Honestly

Medium format on a budget is tempting, but the real question is whether it changes how you work or just slows you down. This video puts you on a cold shoreline where the light refuses to cooperate, and you get to see what happens when you commit to a slower setup anyway.

Coming to you from Jason Friend Photography, this grounded video starts at Roa Pier in Sunderland with a sunrise plan that immediately looks shaky. Friend arrives expecting color and ends up thinking in monochrome before the camera is even fully settled. You see the practical side of choosing a location that is interesting but not peaceful, with noise, movement, and no guarantee the sky will play along. The gear choice is deliberate: a big tripod, a heavy body, and older lenses that remove the safety net of modern automation. If you tend to chase perfect conditions, the setup here pushes you to make decisions with whatever shows up.

Friend brings back a camera he previously owned and swore off, the Fujifilm GFX 50S, and he is blunt about why it makes sense now: used prices have shifted and the body can be found around $1,500. He contrasts that with what he uses when walking farther, the Fujifilm GFX100RF, and you can feel the tradeoff between speed and ritual. The core experiment is adapting film-era medium format glass onto the digital body, which forces manual focus and removes electronic hand-holding. He mounts a Mamiya 105-210mm zoom lens from a Mamiya 645 Super and talks through a simple fear most people avoid admitting: the frame might not fill the way you imagined, so you may need a panoramic approach instead of pretending it is fine.

The shooting details are where the video gets quietly useful without turning into a lecture. Friend relies on focus peaking and checks exposure as the light shifts, and you watch him correct a first attempt that runs long and gets away from him. He adds a 6-stop ND filter to smooth the water, then has to rethink timing because the scene brightens faster than expected. He keeps calling the camera slow and clunky, but he treats that as a feature when the goal is careful framing, not speed. The adapter cost comes up too, which is the part people leave out when they say “cheap lens,” and it changes the math if you are building a small kit from scratch. Later, he swaps to a Mamiya 50mm shift lens and deals with rogue waves while trying to keep lines straight, which turns “nice idea” into “move now” in seconds.

The last section changes the feel again, and it is worth watching because it is not just more of the same. Friend breaks his black-and-white rhythm and aims for color with a lighter look, then second-guesses it after seeing the result. There is also a small moment that says a lot about field discipline: he notices something in the frame and physically removes it instead of assuming it will be fixed later in editing software. He closes with an honest note about sharpness and why “not clinically sharp” can still be the right choice when the image has a specific feel. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Friend.