Medium Format but where to start?

tikkathreebarrel

tikkathreebarrel

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I've got an itch to have a dabble with MF. :bang:

I'm mostly a Canon DSLR man, but often with MF lenses and the MF lenses have led me to have a play with, :cuckoo::shake::thinking: 35mm fillum.

So here am I now playing with 35mm film cameras, getting my negs developed and working the negs through a scanner (though whether this turns out to be a long-term solution or whether I go back to getting my negs printed to CD and then tweaking the jpegs to my taste remains to be seen.)

But still I keep looking at MF cameras and drooling over the quality of images and the ergonomics of the kit itself.

I'm not in a position to invest in new kit, or in digital so I'm resigned to fillum and getting it developed at my local family-owned old-fashioned specialist photography shop.

I look at Bronicas and Mamiyas and have been making a few speculative bids on the Bay in the £150 range but if I was to do this rationally, how should I decide what is the right kit for me?
 
tikkathreebarrel said:
I've got an itch to have a dabble with MF. :bang:

I'm mostly a Canon DSLR man, but often with MF lenses and the MF lenses have led me to have a play with, :cuckoo::shake::thinking: 35mm fillum.

So here am I now playing with 35mm film cameras, getting my negs developed and working the negs through a scanner (though whether this turns out to be a long-term solution or whether I go back to getting my negs printed to CD and then tweaking the jpegs to my taste remains to be seen.)

But still I keep looking at MF cameras and drooling over the quality of images and the ergonomics of the kit itself.

I'm not in a position to invest in new kit, or in digital so I'm resigned to fillum and getting it developed at my local family-owned old-fashioned specialist photography shop.

I look at Bronicas and Mamiyas and have been making a few speculative bids on the Bay in the £150 range but if I was to do this rationally, how should I decide what is the right kit for me?
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Well there are plenty of options for you. The best bet is to decide on format first - 645, 6X6 to 6X7 which are the common ones with actual neg area getting larger from left to right in the above examples.

Once you've decided on that - then it's pretty much a choice between twin lens or single lens versions.
 
CT said:
Well there are plenty of options for you. The best bet is to decide on format first - 645, 6X6 to 6X7 which are the common ones with actual neg area getting larger from left to right in the above examples.

Once you've decided on that - then it's pretty much a choice between twin lens or single lens versions.
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CT, Thanks but what's that decision to be based upon please? I think I'm more a single lens kinda guy. Is that cart in front of horse and does that actually matter?

My use will mostly be landscape & people outdoors.
 
Given that you've already looked at Mamiyas, prefer single-lens and will be doing landscapes, been speculatively bidding around £150, I'd personally (and did :) ) go for the RB67. Mine cost me a little more than that (£180) and I thought it a good buy. It was in excellent condition and complete with lens/WLF/120 back.

The way I look at it is if I want to crop square, I get can 6x6 from a 6x7 neg. and only lose 1cm. To crop portrait or landscape from a 6x6, I'd be going down to the equivalent of 6x5 or 6x4.5. If I want to shoot a whole roll at 6x4.5, there's backs available for the RB67. Though for myself, this sort of takes away from the 6x7 capabilities. The RB's have revolving backs (hence the 'RB' designation!) so switching from portrait to landscape format is a simple matter of turning the back through 90degrees.
6x4.5 kit is usually lighter and a bit more portable but not, I think, significantly better to make it a major selling point over 6x7.
RB67 are heavy beasts, no mistake. However, I've never found that stops me hand-holding in good light: I have a right-angle grip fitted to mine. Of course, a hefty tripod is always a good idea.
6x6 is most often TLR territory. I have two of those and they don't get much use. Again, they're Mamiyas, the C33 and C330. Interchangeable lenses.

One thing I did was download the instruction manuals before I went looking to buy seriously. This gave me an idea of what was involved in operating each model I was interested in.
 
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Just as an afterthought, if this were posted in F&C, there's probably more expertise and even more (;) ) opinions about Medium Format.
 
+1.. more likely to get a better answer in the film section.. or spot that this question has been asked and answered before, so perusing those threads might be a useful starting point.

But speaking personally.. the cheapest entry route is a MF folder (6x6 or 6x9 or both) from the 1950s for £20-50, or a TLR from 1950s-70s (6x6).. and that's probably the only way in for the bids you've been making.

I'm not sure when I'm next headed down to BStE (probably not until early September, and mid-week daytime), but I can put the Mamiya RB67 in the car if you want to get a hands-on.
 
Alastair said:
+1.. more likely to get a better answer in the film section.. or spot that this question has been asked and answered before, so perusing those threads might be a useful starting point.

But speaking personally.. the cheapest entry route is a MF folder (6x6 or 6x9 or both) from the 1950s for £20-50, or a TLR from 1950s-70s (6x6).. and that's probably the only way in for the bids you've been making.

I'm not sure when I'm next headed down to BStE (probably not until early September, and mid-week daytime), but I can put the Mamiya RB67 in the car if you want to get a hands-on.
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Hi Alastair and immediately thank you for your generous offer. I've been just missing Mamiyas and Bronicas: clearly I could spend more by a factor of 20 and I'm thinking I ought to try the low cost route before committing - possibly - to a digital back.
 
tikkathreebarrel said:
CT, Thanks but what's that decision to be based upon please? I think I'm more a single lens kinda guy. Is that cart in front of horse and does that actually matter?

My use will mostly be landscape & people outdoors.
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It's not cart in front of the horse at all, and it does matters - there are important differences.

Twin lens reflex cameras are great - for instance the Rolleiflex was the tool to aspire to for most photographers before they largely started to lose popularity due the convenience of 35mm and the huge strides in 35mm film quality. They do have shortcomings though, compared to a MF single lens camera. They don't have magazine backs, so you can't swap films mid roll - they don't have interchangeable lenses, with the exception of the Mamiya C220 and C330 series, and they all suffer from parallax ( the difference between what you see in the viewfinder and what the lens is actually seeing) at close distances, although there are usually compensation devices to overcome the problem.

Single lens versions don't all have magazine backs, so that would rule some out for me straight away, but most do, they all take interchangeable lenses - some, like the RB67 have built in bellows which give very convenient close-up capability straight out of the tin and have no parallax issues
After that it's down to format choice and whether you can get on with shooting in square format (6X6) or would prefer to shoot 645 or 6X7. The old saying is negatives are like boxers - a good big 'un will always beat a
good little 'un, and it's true there's no substitute for negative size, and a 6X7 neg can be cropped down to the other two formats anyway.

Finally, there's the intangible thing of personal preference, so like any camera you need to pick up a few and handle them to see what suits you.
 
Have a look at the Bronica SQB or SQB small and lightweight, 6x6 format, with a range of sharp good value lenses.
 
ah5168 said:
Have a look at the Bronica SQB or SQB small and lightweight, 6x6 format, with a range of sharp good value lenses.
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If small and lightweight is important and you want to shoot 6x6, a Rollei might be a better bet. A Rolleiflex 3.5E weighs in at 1.1kg (compared to an SQ-B which weighs near enough 1.5kg), and most Rolleicords weigh under 900g. A Rolleiflex was the professional press photographer camera, and it wasn't replaced with any other medium format camera (it was replaced by the Nikon F 35mm SLR).
 
freecom2 said:
If small and lightweight is important and you want to shoot 6x6, a Rollei might be a better bet. A Rolleiflex 3.5E weighs in at 1.1kg (compared to an SQ-B which weighs near enough 1.5kg), and most Rolleicords weigh under 900g. A Rolleiflex was the professional press photographer camera, and it wasn't replaced with any other medium format camera (it was replaced by the Nikon F 35mm SLR).
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Small & lightweight isn't a primary concern unless twice as heavy as gripped 5DII and 100-400L lens. The quality of the camera though...
 
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