Update: Richard Sexton has been featured by Phase One. Download the Phase One Richard Sexton PDF.
A Seamless Film to Digital Transition
In mid-summer of 2005 I made a proposal to my primary publisher, Chronicle Books in San Francisco, for a fine art photography book of black and white landscapes of the gulf coast. I’d been photographing the gulf coast since 1991 and had built up a sizable body of work on the region. Though Chronicle was enthusiastic about the images in this series, they had doubts about the viability of the subject as one of national interest and appeal. However, they were willing to at least consider it. Then in August and September, hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the gulf coast. Suddenly there was unrelenting national interest in this region of the country. Whereas the national focus was primarily on the devastation to the city of New Orleans, there was an underlying interest in the geography of the region and particularly how increased storm activity and global warming were impacting the gulf coast. Not only was the climate changing as it pertained to weather, but the book publishing climate was changing as a result of Katrina. Chronicle agreed in the fall of 2005 to publish Terra Incognita. However, the project was only about two-thirds complete in terms of principal photography. There would need to be new photography, particularly post-Katrina imagery, to complete the photo essay.
More from Richard Sexton after the jump.
This project began in 1991, long before any of us had any notion of digital capture. These early images had been made with two camera systems—a square format Mamiya 6 and a 6×12 panoramic back on my 4×5 view camera. I liked photographing with the Mamiya 6 because it was like a big square format Leica. The square format was important for compositional reasons, because many of my images featured a single primary subject and the square frame worked beautifully in these situations. But, since early 2003, I’d been shooting all commercial projects digitally. First with a Canon 1Ds and then a 1DsII. Given that I needed to create a substantial amount of new imagery in the relatively short timeframe of a year, I wanted the new images in the series to be captured digitally. It would save film costs and of equal importance, scanning time. I didn’t want to shoot DIN proportion with a DSLR and then crop the photos square. I wanted a system that would allow me to frame the image in the viewfinder as a square and that would yield a final image at full sensor resolution. I decided to purchase a Phase One P20 back to use on a Mamiya 645 AFD camera platform. This would be the closest digital capture system to my Mamiya 6.
In the fall of 2005, Phase One had just announced a new series of backs—the P45, P30, etc. So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to pick up a used or demo P20 back at a good price. Through Capture Integration I was able to purchase a P20 demo back that had less than 200 actuations. So, for the final six months of the project I shot with the P20 back, producing some of the most successful images in the series, including the front and back covers of the book. Though a 645 AFD is heavier and bulkier than a Mamiya 6 rangefinder, for this project it was a more effective camera system with a wider range of lenses and more precise framing. Once I started using Capture One DB as my raw converter I decided to upgrade to Capture One Pro so that all raw conversions for DSLR captures, as well as the P20 captures, could be converted in C1Pro. I liked the fact that C1Pro handled tethered shooting, image editing and tagging, and raw conversion within a single, intuitive software application. I also performed several comparisons between C1Pro and ACR. I found that C1Pro’s white balance tool worked more effectively than ACR’s yielding a more neutral gray value and more accurate color across the spectrum. Also, C1Pro did a better job with shadow transitions. There was less noise in the shadows and smoother transitions between areas holding shadow detail and black. ACR tended to have splotchy transitional areas in the shadows where there was no photographed detail, but the pixel values weren’t black either. C1Pro also did better with the highlights. There was less posterization between blown out areas and those highlights holding some tonality. And as with the shadows, there was a smoother transition in these areas. In the last couple of years, of course, ACR has seen significant upgrades and with the introduction of Lightroom, Adobe now has an image editing and raw conversion tool that’s more like Capture One.
For about a year preceding my purchase of a P20 back I’d been shooting with a Canon 1DsII. This was the highest resolution DSLR at that time and it had a pixel count that was for all practical purposes identical to the P20. I noticed right away, however, that the P20 was capable of higher resolution. I’m not an expert on all the reasons why this is. But, I can relay the empirical evidence observed from side by side comparisons. A number of factors probably contribute to the resolution and image quality difference. The fact that the 1DsII sensor is a full frame sensor for its platform and the P20 back is a reduced frame sensor for its platform, gives the same lens advantage to the P20 that crop sensors do for the lenses of DSLR platforms. Another factor is the lack of an anti-aliasing filter on the P20 back. Though it helps prevent moiré, an anti-aliasing filter smudges detail that can’t always be recovered through sharpening. Finally, there’s bit-depth, one of the most overlooked and misunderstood of the technical specifications of digital capture. A P20 back captures at 16-bit and the Canon 1DsII captures at 12-bit in RAW format. (Canon has since upgraded its processors to 14-bit.) Essentially, bit-depth represents the range of mathematical possibilities for the value at each photosite and 16-bit capture offers the potential for an exponential increase in the range of values the digital RAW file archives. If pixel count describes the quantity of information, then bit-depth describes the quality of information. So, I would postulate that the combination of a sensor that’s sized within the sweet spot of MF lenses, with no anti-aliasing filter, and 16-bit RAW capture translates to higher image quality than a DSLR even though pixel count is comparable.
My favorite feature of an MF digital back platform, however, is modularity. The camera body, lenses, film, and digital back can all be interchanged and upgraded independently of each other. I no longer shoot with a Canon 1 series DSLR, but use a 5D instead. Not only is the 5D smaller, quieter, and offers superior image quality at high ISO settings, but it’s a cheaper more logical camera considering its probable lifespan. I fully expect that when the 5D successor comes out in the next 12 months or so, I’ll upgrade and the cost of this transition will be far less than with a 1 series Canon. With an MF system it makes more sense to invest in a rugged, pro grade camera body because if you upgrade the back, you don’t have to simultaneously upgrade the camera body. I also believe that Phase One’s open-platform philosophy fully supports this modularity and is the only logical approach to medium format digital capture.
But, there are aesthetic considerations to MF digital capture that are equally as important as image quality and modularity. During the film-only era of photography, photographer’s chose between a wide range of film formats—DIN proportion, square, the so-called “ideal” format of 645, 4×5, and 8×10, and then there were a wide variety of panoramic formats that offered aspect ratios from 1:2 to 1:4 and even greater. The pervasive DSLR format that has defined the beginning of the digital era, offers photographers DIN format capture only. I know, you can always crop the image, but in the process you throw away precious pixels and can severely limit the size of print reproduction when you make extreme crops. My philosophy, which has been guided by over 3 decades of shooting experience, is that it’s always best to compose and print using the format that works best for a given subject. I work methodically, compose in camera, and crop the image after the fact only when I have to. One of the classic formats of film photography was the square and
photographers tended to love it or hate it. Medium format photography, whether with a Hasselblad or a Rollei twin lens, or any number of other MF systems, tended to be defined by square format. For certain subjects and certain shooting situations, this format offers unique compositional opportunities and when I first started shooting digitally, one of the things I missed was the ability to shoot in a wide variety of formats, a luxury I had always enjoyed when shooting film. The P20 back, with its square format sensor, gave me the option to continue to shoot in a style that I’d adopted years earlier. It’s about choice and this is almost always a good thing.
What was most beneficial for me as a photographer was the way that Phase One equipment allowed me to transition to digital capture and yet maintain a style and photographic approach for a project with which I had a 15 year history. It’s not apparent to anyone who peruses Terra Incognita which shots were made on film and which were captured digitally. The release of the book was accompanied by an exhibit of the same name at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The images captured with the P20 back were enlarged to as much as 22” square for the exhibit and they held up beautifully. Even at this scale distinguishing between film and digital captures was virtually impossible. But, more importantly it wasn’t something the viewer even thought about. The work was consistent technically and thematically from beginning to end. No one really thought about all the technological changes in photography over the course of the project. This is the way it should be for photographers and their audience. New equipment and new technology should allow us to do what we’ve always done, but do it better and easier.
Richard Sexton is a noted fine art and media photographer whose work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Terra Incognita is his eighth title with Chronicle Books. Sexton’s work is included in the Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and numerous private collections. His multidisciplinary studio is based in New Orleans. Additional information is available on his web site: www.richardsextonstudio.com
