The photographs I’ve posted so far have all been taken with a Canon Rebel XTi, a 10.1 megapixel digital camera several years old. It’s small for a digital SLR, so it’s easy to carry around, particularly when I limit myself to just a few lenses. But nothing beats shooting with a medium format camera, like my Mamiya RZ67 Pro II. It’s a huge camera and inconvenient to transport, especially while hiking on the Delaware & Raritan Canal State Park trails, but the image quality is fantastic.
These photographs were developed by a local lab, who also scanned the negatives. I have since purchased my own scanner (an Epson Perfection V700), so I’ll be doing my own scans less expensively in the future. These photographs were taken on the campus of Princeton University and on trails that follow the canal near campus.
I love the quality of the image I can get with medium format. I’ll of course need to keep practicing my photography skills to make the best use of this, but there is nothing better than taking the time to create an image with a camera that generates a highly-detailed negative. I suppose if there’s anything better than medium format, which puts 35mm and digital cameras with smaller sensors to shame, it would be large format.
Continue reading this post for some photographs or take a look at my Flickr collection dedicated to medium format photography.
