A hazy day in Paradise

[simato73]

(The total load would include film, of course - 20 to 30 rolls for a typical day.)

20 or 30 rolls of MF film per day?!
How many frames in a roll?
I thought that shooting with MF was a more deliberate, slow process.
It must have been very expensive also in terms of running costs; I imagine one would have the film processed in a professional facility, not a consumer one.

[Erik Lund]

The old 6x7 was 1.3 Kg and one of the best lenses; smc 67 400mm f/4 ED IF was 3.7 Kg and a big tripod was mandatory,,,


Images was stunning, indeed price was high 12 10 images per roll,,,  Came home from a trip to the Alps with about 60 images,,,

Sorry for posting images in your thread Dave I hope its OK,,,

Zugspitze:


Garmish_0008 by Erik Gunst Lund, on Flickr


Garmish_0006 by Erik Gunst Lund, on Flickr


The scan is saved on Flicker at 3000 pixel I believe the original scans are about 7000 pixel or more,,, Coolscan LS-8000 - each scan took about 45 minutes,,,

[David H. Hartman]

Funny I still don't remember the Pentax 6x7 as being that heavy. Here is a cut and paste from a Pentax 67II brochure...

185.5mm (W) x 151.0mm (H) x 106.0mm (D)
(7.3" x 5.9" x 4.2") and 1,660g (58.6 oz.) with
AE pentaprism finder 67II and without
batteries.

I owned two bodies with a standard non-meter prism and a waist level finder. The weight above is for the AE prism. I think I owned a 55mm, 90 w/sync, 135 macro and a 200mm. I liked that I could shoot Kodacolor 400 in the early evening using found support and the grain wasn't too offensive.

Dave

[ColinM]

I'd like to thank Dave and Erik for posting their images.

Takes me back to the 1980's when I used Pentax SLR's and also owned a 6x7 for a few years. I admit the main barrier was having the time to use it properly (I was still learning my craft with the 35mm kit).

I was going to boast about having taken mine, plus tripod up Mount Snowden, but Erik beat me to it with a bigger climb (and much heavier lens that I had). In the end, I was torn between taking the time to get the composition right (and using a hand-held light meter) and my wife getting bored of waiting and walking off 

One comment/question for Dave:
Your image has lovely content, but appears less detailed than Erik's. That might just be the contrast & subject matter, but maybe yours was scanned at a lower resolution?

[Akira]

Erik, the first one is stunning!  The gradation is very rich, which was one of the major advantages of MF (or LF for that matter) over 135 format, if I remember correctly.

[Erik Lund]

Thanks Akira! Appriciate it.


The rendering was so nice!


Zugspitze


Garmish_0011 by Erik Gunst Lund, on Flickr

[Akira]

Oh, yes, the gradient of the mountains corresponding to their distances is beautifully rendered on both the first and the latest images.

[David Paterson]

20 or 30 rolls of MF film per day?!
How many frames in a roll?
I thought that shooting with MF was a more deliberate, slow process.
It must have been very expensive also in terms of running costs; I imagine one would have the film processed in a professional facility, not a consumer one.

I was talking about my years of professional use of the Pentax 67. I generally would have an art director or designer with me, and could not possibly run out of film if we were more than a couple of hundred metres from the car; it would have looked so unprofessional; so I always carried a safe margin. But I used the 67 exactly as though it was a 35mm.

With the 67 you got *10 frames on a 120 roll* (Erik!), or 20 on a 220 roll. By the time I switched to digital, the cost of film and processing was more than 50P per frame; ie. shoot 2 exposures and you had spent over £!.00 - it could get quite expensive.

David - I forgot about the weight of the pentaprism - that really was a heavy camera.

Erik - of course I don't mind, especially when they are stunning shots like these. I never had the monster 400, but I had the 300 f4 ED - that was a lovely lens too.  Actually I had quite a good range of lenses - 30mm fisheye, 45, 55, 75, 105 f2.5 (their "fast" lens), 165, 200 and 300; but I soon slimmed down a bit, losing the 55 and 200.

[David Paterson]

Colin and Akira, thank you both for commenting.

Colin - I think Erik's beautiful shots illustrate a common phenomenon of high mountains, when haze fills the valleys but the summits are up in clear air, but our modest little Scottish hills can't rise above such ground-haze. Also, this piece of film wasn't scanned but copied using my D800 so the quality is not quite what you would get from a good scan. When processing the copy, towards the end I actually softened a lot of semi-detail because it just didn't look right - details already made soft by the haze. This is that rare thing - an image that looks better as a print than on a monitor; I've just made a  21" print, and it looks pretty good (imho).

[Peter Connan]

Sorry for taking this thread even more off topic.

Elsa Hoffmann and I were discussing the cost of digital photography the other day.
My father's job was taking photos of school kids, which is a vocation where a lot of photos are taken in a relatively short period of time. I calculated the other day that he took probably in excess of 2.4 million photos while doing this.

In the process, he used two F3's and an FE for backup. Thus, at least one of the F3's had more than a million shutter actuations. Modern digital cameras seem not to last nearly as long. In fact, my D750 has eaten two shutter mechanisms in less than 62 000 actuations.

But the real cost probably lies in the post-processing hardware. A new high-end computer every 2-3 years is pretty expensive. And they don't seem to last much longer than that.

[simato73]

At 50p per image (see David's post above) if your father shot 6x7, he would have spend ~1.2M £ over the course of his professional career, only on film and development.
Granted 135 format is much cheaper. Let's say 1/5 of the cost. Still £240K (probably more). Much more I reckon than a single professional with a small business would spend on computers and digital cameras over an equivalent time.
I think everyone agrees running a photography business has become cheaper in the digital age, if one only considers equipment and consumables.
I think (a non-professional, not so informed point of view) that professional photographers these days face different challenges.

[Akira]

My friend pro photog said during the film days that the slide films and development cost around 100,000 JPY per year.  He used 35mm, Pentax 6x7 as well as 4x5 cameras.

But I used the 67 exactly as though it was a 35mm.

As amateur photographer, I used 35mm film cameras (my favorite film was Kodachrome 25) as though they were 4x5 LF cameras.   

As I wanted to develop the film as soon as possible, I liked to use 24-exposure films.