dougpeterson
Workshop Member
I think this hits the nail on the head. If your day-to-day shooting is in situations where you need leaf shutter lenses (mostly outdoor fashion/portrait with flash) then your best option is an all-leaf-shutter-lens system. Most photographers don't fall in this camp though and only need fast flash sync on occasion.Mamiya is developing some of these which are supposed to be here soon, and the Leica S is supposed to also have a few leaf shutter lenses. Unfortunately, the Contax 645 was discontinued before any were offered from Kyocera/Zeiss.
My personal issue with that, is that I need all of my lenses to be Leaf Shutter type. I cannot be confined to a few focal lengths in my work.
This is where economics come in. Leaf shutter lenses are inherently more expensive because each of them contain a shutter mechanism. So if you only use fast flash sync on occasion then you're paying an unneccessary premium for those lenses.
A system like the Mamiya and the Leica S2 which will imminently have the benefits of focal plane shutters and leaf shutter lenses is just icing on the cake.
I'm attaching a shot from the lighting seminar below which illustrates a need for fast shutter sync. The exposure was 1/500th @ f/16 at ISO 50. If this was a focal plane system then I would have needed to shoot through a 2-stop ND filter and turned the flash up 2 full stops. Otherwise the ratio of ambient to flash would have moved 2 stops in favor of ambient and I would have lost the modeling shadows on the model and the sky would have been nearly white.
As a final note, some advanced SLR flashes like the Canon 580EXII can put out a high-frequency pulse of light rather than a single "pop" allowing focal plane shutters to sync at faster than their native flash sync speed. Not a full solution of course, but a useful aid for those who only very rarely need fast flash sync.
Doug Peterson, Head of Technical Services
Capture Integration, Phase One Dealer
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