M8 Conversion Factor Aesthetics

[matthew_gibbons2]

It has been a while since I posted on to this forum. Last time I wrote I was

arguing that a M7 and slide is as good as it gets. Since then I have be on the

road travelling for 10 months in Latin America. I am yet to see the reults of

my efforts as I have not been home to develop the film yet, the cost of slide

concerns me and the worry of carrying film, the ease of manipulating and

publishing digital has lead to think again. Besides all this I have been very

impressed with some of the M8 images you guys have posted. Anyway as I plan to

keep travel for a few more years I am seriously considering eating my words

and trading in for an M8.

 

A question.

 

I use an M8 x.085 with a 50mm Lux Asph exlcusively. I have come to love this

set up and I would really like to replicate with an M8. My question is what

would be different if I put and 35mm lens on a M8?

 

I expect that area of capture would be the same as a 50mm on a M7 but what

would happen to the look of the image. For example, if I made a portrait of

someone from 6ft with a M7 and 50mm or a M8 and 35mm what would be different

about the look and feel of the image, the perspective, the depth of field.

Would the subject?s nose look bigger with a 35mm M8 combo?

 

I would appreciate any thoughts on how the the conversion factor of the M8

affects the aesthetics of images. Thanks.

[Rob F.]

If you shoot from the same distance, you will get the same perspective. So the subject's nose will not look bigger. Even though you are using a 35 instead of a 50, you will still have to shoot at about the same distance, due to the cropping factor.

 

The real problem with digital is for those of us who want to shoot extreme wide angle. If I want a 24mm equivalent, I would need a 16mm lens with most digital cameras; in the case of the M8, I would need an 18mm. But you can use your 35 as a 50 without concerns for altered perspective.

[asher]

Why not wait until you see your developed images before forcing a "decision"?

[asher]

Another point with respect to the cost of slides that you mentioned: bulk load your film

and it's much cheaper. You can easily calculate how many rolls & images + developing you

would get for $5000. I did this for B&W (admittedly cheaper than chromes) and I could

shoot and develop over 1400 rolls of Plus X: that's over 50,000 images.

<p>

Also, get a lead film bag for travel, although if you read some of the many prior threads on

this issue, handbag screening x-rays have no effect on film without these bags, until

dozens of scans. Here are some informative websites:<p>

<a href="http://underwaterphotos.com/Filmsafe.htm">http://underwaterphotos.com/

Filmsafe.htm</a><p>

<a href="http://www.cameramentor.com/FYI_XRays_and_Photographic_Film">http://

www.cameramentor.com/FYI_XRays_and_Photographic_Film</a>

[asher]

<i>"the ease of manipulating and publishing digital has lead to think again"</i><p>

 

Yet another afterthought... With 8-10 megapixel digital I find that my time is spent at the

back end, using Photoshop to adjust brightness, contrast etc, often without total

satisfaction (you can't really judge that with small, PNet-posted jpeg files...). With film my

efforts are at the front end (shooting, developing, scanning), and I need to do little, if

anything in Photoshop to get the tonal range and quality of image I desired, and I have an

archival negative to boot (for when a 10,000 dpi scanner is affordable!)<p>

 

Other benefits of film for travel:

<ul>

<li>My electronics stay at home with my scanner, rather than hanging around my neck,

out in the dust, sand, mud, rain, snow, wind, heat, cold, etc...</li>

<li>I don't need a handful of AC adaptors and international adapators for the charger,

laptop, hard drives/backup drives etc.</li>

</ul><p>

 

Either way, one must invest time and effort to express a vision. You can do it successfully

with either film or digital, but don't kid yourself that the M8 is going yield chrome-like

images while magically reducing your workflow to nil.

[ellis_vener_photography]

"I would appreciate any thoughts on how the the conversion factor of the M8 affects the aesthetics of images. Thanks.

"

 

You'll never know until you try it.

[frank_doering]

The issue is depth of field. Given identical camera position and identical final print (or projection) size, depth of field depends upon NOTHING BUT THE PHYSICAL SIZE OF THE APERTURE. Your maximum opening on your 50mm lens is 50/1.4 = 35.7mm. Your maximum opening on a 35mm lens is 35/1.4 = 25mm. To get a 25mm opening on your 50mm lens, you stop down to f/2. Ergo, the look you get with the 35mm f/1.4 lens fully open equals the look of the 50mm lens at f/2, as far as DoF is concerned. This is what causes a headache at the wide end. In order to get the angular coverage of, say, a 28mm lens attached to an M7, I need a 20mm lens on an M8. But the wider lens will be at least one stop slower, and in addition I will incur the effect of stopping down one stop due to the conversion factor. So the digital "look" I get amounts to a depth-of-field increase by TWO f-stops (and this is the best case scenario for the fastest lenses around). This is unacceptable if you like shallow depth of field in a wide angle image.

[jean_.]

From my own experience of my conversion from film to digital I see two factors. First one

is that the images have more or less migrated to a digital environment, they are shared,

viewed, stored and post-processed digitally. For me this means that a photo doesn't really

"exist" unless it's digital. People see a print and say wow, that's nice, can you email it to

me? Or set up a slideshow at flickr? Not that long ago it was the opposite. Folks saw a

photo on my monitor (I was a very early adopter of digital photography!) and asked for a

print - which was nearly impossible to achieve in the late 90s. IT infrastructure was so

primitive then that a digital photo was a handicap and could only be seen on my monitor!

If you embraced this part of the digital workflow you will spend (= waste) a lot of time for

scanning your film, and I would strongly recommend a digital capture to make life easier.

As to the comment of a special "vodoo" that's required to make a digital photo look as

good as a chrome - that's nonsense. Tools like Aperture or Lightroom have eliminated all

that RAW conversion wizardry. If you expose as careful as with film, there will be no

issues afterwards, you just skip the tedious scanning.

 

OK, but now the downside of digital. It has been mentioned before, and I have to agree

that carrying along a truckload of AC adaptors, batteries, cables, adaptors in order to take

photos is a serious pain. The effort needed to keep the required digital infrastructure

running is huge and I experience this as becoming a problem that takes a bit of the fun

out of travelling. Compared with just throwing in a camera and film rolls in my bag I don't

feel that digital has brought an improvement when I look at the bulk I'm now carrying even

for a one day trip. But then I just pop the SD into the adapter dangling from my notebook

that's hooked up to AC power together with the cellphone and the camera and voila, I can

edit my pics and then again I feel it's worth all the effort. And I still have some rolls to

scan, always postponing the scanning tro another weekend.

 

So, in the end, I would take the M8 if I could afford it. By affording it I mean if I could bring

it to all places I'd like to witout worrying loss, theft or damage because i could easily

afford another one just in case.. Fussing about the fear that slides or film would yield

better results is really a waste of time, but it is very important to be clear about your own

workflow and intended use of the photos. You know, nothing beats a projected slide. If

this is what you are after then digital would be a waste of money. If you plan to use the

photos only digitally than a film camera is a waste of your precious time.

[matthew_gibbons2]

Thank Guys, as usual you give me plenty to think about. I do have a real love for slide, whenever I go to the cinema and see beautiful imagery I smile that my little M7 can do that. The issue for me is that I intend to spend the next few years or more on the road and I am not sure I will even settle back in London after that. So viewing, storage, scanning seems a long way away. An M8 seem more real time than slide but somewhat of a compromise.