Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2014/04/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]So in practice shooting medium format with only one lens may turn out not as unwise as it seems. What's not obvious to a long time 35mm shooter getting into medium format for the first time film or digital is that there is a certain flexibility with medium format which can even make 35mm shooting seem rigid. With 35mm we always needed to be quite conservative with cropping and many thought that any cropping at all with not cool. With medium format many started off with square they had no intention of sticking with squares were almost viewed as reprehensible. We decided not even as we shot the pix maybe later if we'd crop them into verticals or horizontals or the lab would make that decision for us. Racking the enlarger up and taking out a smallish chunk out of a medium format neg was par for the course. It was like we shot loose and defined the real composition of the image later... We had plenty to work from. And we could even make a vertical and horizontal from the same image... End up with a landscape as well as a portrait. When the 645's came out you still had plenty of cropping power. 35mm film was viewed as just a tad insanely small to begin with so to then crop them much at all seemed daft. My first medium format camera was that twin lens Rolleiflex and I found later how extremely cropped some of those images could be. It was way different than the way I approached my 35mm negs. I may have not had a short tele but the pix could easily be cropped that much. In effect making a 4x4 out of a 6x6. So in practice shooting medium format with only one lens may turn out not as unwise as it seems. -- Mark William Rabiner Photographer http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/lugalrabs/