Photography and Imaging 2

So I’ve been meaning to post something here for a while about the relative advantages and disadvantages of different capture formats and the blog seems like a perfect place to show you some examples.

As some of you know I spent this summer writing a book for amateur photographers, it got me to thinking about the evolution of snapshot photography. Around the same time one of the other teachers in the department, Peter Lucas, was curating a show of snapshots he had found in a Brazilian flea market. The photographs were made by a dentist who prowled the beaches of Ipanema in the 50’s photographing “The Girls of Ipanema” as they were out walking.

I loved the simplicity and charm of these photos and I started to try and figure out why.

One thing that I became fixated on was the format and the inherent depth of field of the Yaschica Mat camera the photographer worked with. I realized that the trend in amateur cameras has always been an ever shrinking format, from 620, to 35mm, to 126 Instamatic, to Kodak disc cameras, to APS, and finally to digital cameras with teeny tiny sensors (even with 12MP resolution). Manufacturers love smaller cameras, film gets tiny (and costs less) and cameras become pocketable. The ever-diminishing format meant that focal lengths have gotten shorter and shorter, yielding more and more depth of field, something that most snapshooters like. But, what does this mean for the evolution of a visual vocabulary? How does “rendering” change the syntax of the photographic document? What happens when everything is always sharp? With modern digital cameras (especially with kit zoom lenses) it is actually difficult to make a photo that isn’t sharp everywhere.

It becomes very interesting when you consider how digital imaging is changing the playing field; the Canon G9 resolves the same mega pixels as the Canon 5D, but it does so in a very different way due to the sensor size. Similarly I recently tested a new 39 MP PhaseOne back against 4 X 5 film for a recent job. The 39 MP back had comparable (slightly better) resolution, but rendered space completely differently due to the characteristics of the lens/format combination. In the past photographers chose cameras for reasons of portability against resolution, current digital technology comes close to making that a moot point.

This summer I shot some tests to make all this clear in the book. My editors thought it was too advanced for the books intended audience but I thought you might find them interesting. The field of view and aperture are the same for all of the photos. The difference is the capture format/lens combination. The cameras are all focused at 8 feet.

This is shot with a Canon Powershot and 7.9 mm lens at f-2.8

This is a 20D and a 24mm lens at 2.8

and this is a Canon 5D with a 35mm lens at 2.8

This has been a big issue in cinema/videography for a long time. In fact there are a slew of devices out there that use a groundglass interface so videographers can mount a traditional lens onto a video camera (the video lens is then focused onto the ground glass image) in order to achieve the spatial depth of field “fall off” that is one of the hallmarks of 35mm cinematography. The remarkable thing is that consumer level video cameras have gotten so good that I know professional TV directors who are shooting with $ 600 camcorders that are attached to $3000 groundglass adaptors with $ 5000 lenses on the front. Will we eventually be using point and shoot cameras to photograph the groundglass of an 8 X 10 camera?