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Why medium format

stngoldberg

Well-known member
Recently purchased a wonderful hard cover book titled Photo-Wisdom by Lewis Blackwell. The book is a collection of photographs and thoughts, from over 50 of the worlds best photographers, about their work and the about the media in general.
What may be of interest to those of us who work with medium format are the words of Edward Burtynsky.
"No matter what, I want to photograph the subject where it has found its greatest expression. The ideal way to then experience the work is in the large format and in large prints. With a four-by-five-foot print. stand in front of it, drop into it, put your face six inches away from it and see the detail or stand back and get a sense of the whole. Ideally that is the way work is best seen, although you can get a sense of it through a book or the Web. The real thing is the forty-eight-by-fifty-inch print where you are having a bit of a body experience, one that makes us contemplate, and meditate on the world we are creating. Photography is one of the few ways you can achieve that experience."

Stanley
 
The one thing people need to know about "shooting big", is that they need to start "seeing big" and "printing" big too.

It first happened when I moved from crop to full-frame SLR, before I always shot tighter and had more "closed" compositions, because it was the only way to get a result I felt was adequate. Once I got my 5DII, I started shooting and composing wider, and using the camera in landscape orientation where I would previously use portrait; the increase in sensor size and resolution let me shoot things is ways I previously didn't.

Now, I don't own any MFD cameras (yet), but from the times I have used them, I felt even less of a need to shoot tight, and that I had to print at least A2 size to give the resulting image any purpose... But when I did, it felt more monumental than if I had framed up the same shot with a smaller format.

The Damn problem I have is no more wall space left.
Ditto!
 
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