Friday, November 26, 2010

Digital versus film

This is an image taken with Hasselblad X-Pan and the 45mm lens, scan by Nikon Coolscan 8000ED, this was an old stock.  X-Pan was once the most popular panoramic camera, using stock 135mm film.  The first camera I can remembe and use was the Mamiya 6/7 with its 135mm film adapter with basically the same result, however with a much larger camera body, although it is also fair to say Mamiya 6/7 is relatively compact for what it is and light for what it is.
All the discussions on film versus digital are mostly focus on the image result and even today it is still a hot topic among few photographer, for me, the film days were clear gone for me and I have no desire to engage in discussion of which is better, because my mind has made.  But film does remind me some of the images I took, particular this one.  Not that I could have not take this image with a digital camera, but for that film stored in the small canister can be actually quite flexible, simply stretch it inside the cametra, then you can get a panoramic image with the exact media.  With digital, the image sensor is static. Certainly there are also solutions for digital panoramic that I covered a few times in this blog, but they may not deal with this image well for its releatively close foreground, and the fact to use a slower shutter speed to allow the flower blur by the breeze.  Swiss camewra maker, Seitz, in fact did a panoramic camera Seitz 617 - with a mechanism to move the image sensor inside the camera chamber as a field scanner, and it works, with the result of 160mpx resolution.  It has its limitation, but that applies to all camera equipment.
I often wondered, how long will it take a modern day Hasselblad X-Pan? With a panoramic format of capturing sensor? The flexibility to capture full 16:9 to even sub-full frame 35mm image in one small body such as X-Pan?

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