Shockingly bad

<p>Is there somewhere a place where one could find an example of the superiority of large format in relation to medium format (and medium format to 35 mm)?</p>

<p>Why is it that magazines often require nothing else than medium or large format when they'll end up printing the photo on a letter-sized piece of paper?</p>

<p>What magazines have that requirement?</p>

<p>Atina:<br>

<br />Most people can see the difference when they visit any good art museum. In a place like New York's Museum of Modern Art, you can see the best of every format on display. It's worth a visit.</p>

<p>As for magazines; you'll have to tell us which ones you mean. </p>

 

<p>As far as I remember 'Arizona Highways' had that requirement, but I don't know if it is still valid.</p>

<p>hi<br>

often times in printed media you can't really see any difference,<br />unless it was a photograph where perspective control was used<br />to bring everything into focus ( extreme foreground to extreme background )<br />or straighten out the perspective of a tilted building, or extreme out of focus images ..<br />(but even they can be done with 35mm film and an enlarger head that allows for swings/tilts )<br />but for the most part if the photographer using 35mm, MF or LF is competent<br />you might not notice a difference. often times people suggest where you CAN see the difference<br />beginning in 5x7 or 8x10 because you may be seeing a different "tonality" but even then it is subjective.<br /><br />my favorite is when people upload images that are so large you can't even see the whole thing<br />unless you have a giant screen ... because they want to impress the viewer with "the details" ..<br /><br />when the scan of a 8mm film still enlarged to 30x40TIFF will yield as much information.<br /><br />good luck with your search!</p>

<p>Arizona Highways accepts files from any format, including digital.</p>

<p>Interesting that there is no response, since the poster has been on other threads since. </p>

This certainly was stock in trade information found in pro photo business practice books up until the 1990s. As E6 films improved by the early 90's, and as film scanning overtook optical color separations (and as scanners themselves improved) the differences in quality became mostly imperceptible in print at the common print sizes used in magazines, at the typical screen resolution used on sheet fed and web fed printing presses. As mentioned Arizona Highways was one of the last to insist upon LF, but that might have been as much to winnow the volume of submissions by eliminating 35mm toting Galen Rowell wannabees.

 

There remained other reasons to shoot LF and MF like proofing (and larger viewing areas of proofs), for assigmnent work. Other reasons might be leaf shutter sync'ing of electronic flash to 1/1000 with certain MF lenses or 1/500 with Copal 0's in LF.

<p>I've found that often (but not always) I see substantially greater graininess in an 8x10-inch print from 35mm film, compared to an otherwise-similar print from medium format film. Obviously letter-size (8.5 x 11 inches), which many magazines use, is a slightly greater enlargement, as is the metric A4-size. So yes, in my opinion, at normal sizes for <em>one</em> page of a magazine, medium format film can (depending on processing and printing techniques) provide a real improvement over 35mm film. Make it a two-page spread and the difference would often be clear.</p>

<p>IMO unless you are printing really huge, the reason to use large format is mainly for a view camera's movements.</p>

<p>For a darkroom print it's easy to see the difference between 4x5 and 35mm film on an 8x10 print. On inkjet output from the D800E and scanned 4x5 film it's hard to see the difference at 16x20, assuming no usage of movements on the 4x5. Scaling the D800E file to the maximum enlargement of the 4x5 the 4x5 is easily more detailed. But that's a huge print size; much bigger than a magazine needs and much bigger than I print.</p>

<p>"Why is it that magazines often require nothing else than medium or large format when they'll end up printing the photo on a letter-sized piece of paper?"<br />What decade are you talking about? Even in his 1996 Business of Nature Photography book, John Shaw dedicated a page or more to why 35mm was the bread and butter of nature photographers and that there was little point to shooting medium format or large format because magazines were perfectly happy with 35 and would not pay any more for MF or LF.<br />Are magazines even accepting film -- any size of film -- today? I remember some threads a couple of years ago about how stock agencies were requiring photographers to submit pictures shot on film as digital files so that the cost of scanning would be on the photographer rather than on the agency.</p>

<p>What does "Shockingly Bad" have to do with anything in the original post?</p>

<p>"What does "Shockingly Bad" have to do with anything in the original post?"<br>

<br />It is a fitting description f it. The second half anyway.</p>

<p>maybe the title is just a way to get people's attention ?</p>

<p>there really aren't many differences between formats anymore, its just an ego-thing these days.</p>

 

<p>If you aren't printing big there is no advantage, unless you need the movements and don't want to see any grain. Medium format lenses are sharper, and 35mm lenses are sharper still. It's all about the size of the neg and it's maximum print size. 4x5 is excellent for portraits, but you can get pretty much the same shot w/ a medium format Heliar lens and the right lighting/technique.</p>

<p>If you aren't printing big there is no advantage, unless you need the movements and don't want to see any grain. Medium format lenses are sharper, and 35mm lenses are sharper still. It's all about the size of the neg and it's maximum print size. 4x5 is excellent for portraits, but you can get pretty much the same shot w/ a medium format Heliar lens and the right lighting/technique.</p>

Once upon a time (1940's-late 1970's), starting out with larger format film transparencies made it vastly easier to dust, spot and retouch the optical half-tone color separations required with old style prepress work. Optical color separations were the original reason for a transparency-only color workflow. Decades later, digital service bureaus and their scanner and film recorder equipment adopted the standards established with analog workflows, in the transition period to digital. Low end drum scanners (the $50K ones back in the day) don't resolve well enough when scanning 35mm; worsening matters was that film recorder output (printing devices that rendered the 4 layer CMYK black and white analog negatives on photosensitive materials from a digital file) required in early digital prepress work, until the mid-90's, inserted yet another generational loss. Such losses could be overcome with the brute force approach of more film real estate and an abundance of detail that was mostly being tossed. The best 35mm lenses were very good indeed and the resulting original transparencies made in the 1980's were really not much different than what we have today, but they nevertheless too often didn't translate well into print. Photoshop was not on every magazine art director's computer, that was a 90's phenomenon.

So no, there was indeed a time it was unusual to see 135 format printed at full-bleed, double-truck in an art magazine or even high-end lifestyles magazine. But, as mentioned, that all happened a generation or more ago. Smaller sensor sizes than 35mm full frame work today in large part because the prepress methods have been not just evolving, but revolutionized, not because the lenses or format was inferior.

<p>Not so much these days, but in times past it was in the presentation of original transparencies to a photo buyer. A 4X5 transparency virtually blows away a 35mm slide on a light table (with compositions and exposure being uniformly excellent in both). For covers and large spreads in magazines and calendars 4x5 is irresistible to publishers. If you ever have a chance to see both formats together on a light table don't pass up the opportunity. The same advantage also applies with 4x5 compared to medium format, but not quite as dramatically. </p>

<p>Go to here.. <br>

http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/cameratest-2/800px.html<br>

Scroll down to 'Studio Hasselblad' - choose 4x5 Provia Denoised on the left hand side and Mamiya 7 Portra 160 on the right hand side. <br>

A good quality magazine double page spread from is till a challenge for many DSLRs (and historically probably all of them) and a good MF shot drum scanned is on a par with a D800E.. <br>

http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/velvia50-mamiya7-cms20-d800e.jpg<br>

Tim<br>

p.s. Results came from testing in http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2011/12/big-camera-comparison/</p>

<p> </p>