UNIT 3 - AO2 - MEDIUM FORMAT

Charles Power
Dec 24, 2015
3 min read

Since the start of unit 3 it becamse quite apparent that I had to push the technological boundaries of the art form that is photography, Medium format film still renouned to produce some of the highest quality photographs and was highly popular during the early 20th century until the late 40s with the invention of the 35mm format and the legendary brand that became Leica.

But whats the benifits of shooting on Medium format film compared to 35mm?

The size of the actual film itself is huge, because of the size difference, you get far less image noise, more dynamic range, better image tonality and higher image quality / resolution, etc on your photograph. The photograph below shows a size difference between 35mm and 6x6 medium format. Thats another thing, unlike normal photographic aspect ratios (3:2), the Film and Camera I'm going to be shooting on shall be in a Square 1:1 aspect ratio, because of this change I'm going to have to encorporate new ideas in terms of the composistion of the photograph to match the new frame.

One of the main dis-advantages with shooting on medium format (120mm) film is your now limited to only 12 shots per roll of film, compared to 24/36 on 35mm film or ∞ depending on what your SD card/resolution your shooting on a digital camera.

The Camera

For this project I decided to go out and buy a TLR (Twin-Lens-Reflex) camera, this is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length. One of the

lenses is the photographic "taking lens" (the lens that takes the picture), while the other is used for the viewfinder system, which is usually viewed from above at waist level. One of the advantages for using a TLR for me is being able to shoot the camera at waist-level because if I were to shoot at eye-level it would be conspicuous to the public, with the TLR I can be more secretive compared to shooting with a traditional SLR. Also, cecause of their mechanical simplicity, TLR cameras are considerably cheaper than SLR cameras of similar optical quality, as well as inherently less prone to mechanical failure. The picture below is what it looks like, looking down to take a picture with the camera.

Inspiration

My main inspiration for this project would have to be Vivian Maier (See right), a 1950s nanny in New York who took over 150,000 photographs on her TLR, she never published or showed anyone her photographs until she died in 2009 when someone bought her negatives and stuff in an auction.

She had a great sense of style, humour, sadness and captured the focus of the human condition in her photographs.

I'm not going to go into full depth about her work but here are some of my favourite photographs from her work:

The Shoot.

For my work I really wanted to try and capture an event. On my first roll the last half was shot in town at a strike about the removal of some of the older trees in Sheffield so the council can repair the pavements (See the first line). On my second roll I went to Falmouth in cornwall for an open day and afterwards we went to the beach so I wanted to try and document that (see the second line). After that I wanted to experiment with some portraits to see how they turned out for some future project ideas.

A full high resolution album can be found here. Here are my favourite photographs from the two rolls I shot over two weeks:

One of the things I had to learn was to guess what exposure I had to shoot, because the camera was from the 1950s, it didn't have metering built in, so what people would used to do is they would have a seperate device called a light meter which would litterally tell them a rough setting to shoot on. Because of this I went and bought one and it became a very handy tool. However, what I later learned with the british weather in hand is that when the weather starts to become cloudly and dull, the lighting conditions are mostly the same, I found my self shooting at around 1/400 at F/8 most of the time.

Conclusion

All In all I really enjoyed shooting Medium Format Film on my TLR, the images its made offer a really unique quality compared to other formats, from its 1:1 aspect ratio to the actual size of the film itself and the benifits it brings with it. I hope I can find more time to shoot on this camera for further projects in the future.