Medium format with Molly

St Valentines and we went out, under the sun to have some fun with some gorgeous gowns from Enchante Bridal & Formal Wear.

Molly is our model of the day and Natalia is the talented MUA & Hair stylist for the shoot.

I packed my Canon 5D Mark III and my Hasselblad H4D40 planning for some fashion and scenery shots at the newly opened National Arboretum Canberra.

When digital cameras came along, we have assisted in a continuous race against the pixel counts. Cameras started from a mere 2 mega pixels to now carry almost 40 mega pixel in what has been the standard for the SLR sensor size, also known as full frame, of 24 x 36 mm.

Pushing the limits of physics to increase pixel counts has some downside effects, aside from the noise and file size, we are facing the optical issue: lenses can no more resolve the resolution of the sensors.

Need less to say that the primary weakness of dSLR is dynamic range, partially due to the size of the pixel (ability to store light) and also because of the files size of 14 bits.

I wanted for the shot to see, what I already knew, the difference in term of sensor size vs the pixel counts.

Below are images form a same fram, captured with the Hasselblad H4D40 (40 mega pixels and a bigger sensor compares to the dSLR’s one).

The series of images are from screen captures of my 30″ Apple Cinema display (2560×1600 pixels). The first image shows the full image and the subsequent images are at 100% crop of various parts of the images.

The last image is the FULL SIZE images practically converted from an Hassleblad raw file into JPEG without any post.

For the tech and strobist bits:

Camera: H4D40 | Lens: HC 100mm f/2.2

Speed 1/400 f/8 ISO 100 (basic exposure, sweet sixteen, for a sunny outdoor shoot)

Because the model was back to the sun, I added some fill with a Quantum Qflash TD5-R with an inversed dome at 1/2 power (about 75 Ws)

Model: Molly

MUA & Hair: NataliaGowns by Enchante Bridal & Formal Wear (59 Wollongong St  Fyshwick ACT 2620. COntact: (02) 6280 9869)

Images copyrights NOMAD PHOTOGRAPHY.

Click on images to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click on the image below to open the full size image, in a new window, out of the Hasselblad H4D40 (5.8MB).