Horseman SW612 with 55mm Grandagon again. Taken from about 9,000 ft/3,000m in the Japanese Alps.
I have been lucky in my photography as no one really pointed out limitations that seem so commonly expressed. For example, I did not know you could not handhold panoramic cameras, see above. I went for medium-format cameras because of the compromise between portability and quality. I could shoot 400 ISO film and still get very good quality and I could still take my cameras anywhere. (4x5 was great quality and had movements, but the weight and problems with handling film seemed too much. I loved 35mm for the size and choice, but with 400 ISO film, the images were just a little lacking. (I stuck to 400 ISO film because I kept shooting under light that no one told me I couldn't shoot under)) Naturally, the formats are what got me. Loved the square and panoramic formats.
While it was hard to move on from the film cameras I had such a relationship with, I have found remarkable flexibility with digital. I am even surprising myself with how good APS-C is. It gives me a quality I find satisfying while presenting a portable and flexible package to photograph with. My X Pro2 kind of gives me a Mamiya 6, Fuji 6x9, and Horseman SW612 rolled into one (and with an optical viewfinder!). One of the first X Pro2 images I took from Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine.
Obviously, it is easy to talk about photography in regards to technical criteria. Personally, I don't view images that way. I judge an image based on its inherent qualities as presented. Noise, resolution, or DR does not make it better or worse, just different. I guess I am, in economic terms, an optimizer, rather than a maximizer. I was just at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (now closed due to the coronavirus, but I can highly recommend it if you are in the neighborhood (the museum, not the disease)) and looking at their photography collection, not once did I think about the technical aspects of the work, just whether the image was captivating.
I am enjoying this thread.