The "Peter Lindbergh" book that Mike Johnston recommended over on his blog. I'll stick in a link with my review.

Caution! This book weighs about seven pounds.

It's 483 pages of photos. 

And it's good. 

 Mike Johnston at the Online Photographer Blog wrote about the publication of Peter Lindbergh's huge retrospective (post humous) book of photographs here:  MJ's Getting His Fashion Groove On. He had featured an image of Lindbergh's office or home about a week ago and then he came across the new book at Amazon. Mike opted to cut a few corners and order the smaller, paperback edition of the book but being ever cavalier about all things financial I just started hemorrhaging money and placed an order for the full Monte. The large, ponderous, heavy and beautifully printed hard back version. It was still a relative bargain while on sale for only $50 and change. 

I got it yesterday, pulled up a comfortable chair, turned on the good light, poured a glass of the nice wine, and spent an hour going through the book. I'll go back again and again since there is so much here. Nearly all of the images are printed full page or as double trucks and the paper they are printed on is thick and beautiful. I've always been a big fan of Peter Lindbergh and this book is a wonderful addition to my collection of superstar photographer monographs. Taschen Publishing did a great job with this book!

Will you like the images? I don't know. The book had me when Lindbergh combined Kate Moss and Rome. Almost everything is in dark, moody but lovely black and white. I'm glad I ordered the book but I've got to distance myself from MJ's site or I'll soon go bankrupt. Too many good suggestions....

Since he is to blame, if you are a big Peter Lindbergh Photographer fan and want to order the book I'd suggest using the link above to go over to Mike Johnston's site and order from his links. You won't pay anymore for the book. You'll help Mike stay on the keyboard. And I don't offer links to Amazon or B&H anyway. 

So many beautiful people. So much photography.

Big fun with nicely printed paper. Enjoy. 

It was beyond time to get out of town and chill out somewhere else. So I did. I don't want to surprise you but I took a camera along for the ride.

 

I'm spending way too much time in my office. I blame the lockdown. I blame the economic conditions, but really, I just blame myself for not being more proactive with my time. I woke up bored this morning and that's never good. I skipped my usual swim practice and slept in till nine. That's a bad sign. So, after breakfast I grabbed a black Fuji X-100V and an extra battery and pointed the car West. 

My first stop was Johnson City, birthplace of a great president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Man, he got a ton of work done and bills passed for a one term president. Just an amazing amount of very good legislation. I've done a lot of research about his life and career (we produced two plays about LBJ at Zach Theatre) and I'm sure most people don't know that he pushed through 87 major pieces of legislation and got 84 bills passed, which gives him the record with a 96% success rate. And most of the bills didn't do anything to destroy the middle class or raise taxes on less affluent people. In fact, it was almost a golden age for fairness. 

Johnson City is still small but its proximity to Austin means it's growing up and offering more sophisticated visitor amenities. There are several very decent restaurants, a science museum and a lot of art galleries and wine tasting rooms. The architecture all around town is classic Depression Era Texas Modest. With some buildings featuring embossed tin ceilings and layers and layers of styles. It's also home to a sometimes client of ours: The Pedernales Electric Cooperative. 

I made some photos of LBJ's boyhood home, a location which further reminded me that at one point in our country's history a person could rise up from a middle, middle class, rural childhood to become president of the United States of America. It's fun. And you can walk right up and touch the house, if that's what you are into. I touched it with my camera. Then I headed over to Blanco, Texas which is about 10 miles South along Hwy. 281. 

Blanco has a nice state park with a river that runs through it but I was more interested in the old courthouse. It's now a visitor center, and a charming young woman named Riley welcomed me and gave me some local perspective. I'd shot stills for a movie production that used this courthouse as a location for three or four days. That was about 25 years ago. Since then the location has been used by a number of other feature films. In fact, it's the go to place in Texas if you want to do a period courtroom scene but can't afford tens of thousands of dollars in location fees. It was fun to see the space again. I'll chalk the visit down to scouting for one of the law firms we provide photos and video to. They'll love it.

One great find today was a new coffee shop in Johnson City. That was the one thing that kept the town from getting an "A" from me as a destination; no good, local coffee. Now the Johnson City Coffee Company is going full steam (intended...) and serving great coffees and pastries. I sampled their medium roast, drip coffee along with a lemon, blueberry scone, freshly drizzled with fresh, thick creme. Delicious and well done. 

So funny though, when I walked up and ordered the woman at the counter said, "I recognize your voice. Did you used to swim in the Masters at Western Hills Athletic Club?" I said that I did and she said, "I thought so. I'm Nancy. I used to swim with you all there." I remembered her in flash. So hard to be sociable these days with everyone hidden behind masks.... Nancy and her family own the new coffee shop. They'll do well. She was always a disciplined swimmer.

I'm thrilled with the new shop. Finally, a way station between Austin and Fredericksburg, Texas (or Marble Falls) with great coffee, a good rest room and a wide selection of above average pastries. Better than the fare at Starbucks and located in exactly the right spot. Well, at least for everyone driving through the hot spots in Central Texas. 

The camera I took was the Fuji X-100V. The black one. It had fewer than 100 shutter actuations on it when I left. Now it has 396. I set its white balance to the little "sun" icon and kept it there all day. I tried to stick with f8 for most stuff but I did bounce around on apertures when I went into the courthouse. And when I photographed the big ceramic deer. I find the image files to be wonderful; especially when I use the Astia Soft setting in full sun. All good there. Now a recommended camera. At least, it's recommended for me.

Blanco Courthouse Interior. 

Blanco Courthouse, exterior. 

Vast amounts of outside seating at the Johnson City Coffee Company.  Maybe bring a chair in case it gets crowded. Bring two chairs if you are traveling with a spouse. Or fight over one chair. 

Whatever.

Hate to get out of your car? They've got a drive through on the other side.

This is a detail of a building I found just outside of Johnson City. 

It's like a super-modern Quonset Hut but beautifully designed. 

I had to pull in and walk around it a couple of times. The next 

few frames are different angles and magnifications. 

Courthouse in Johnson City. 

who wants to pay for premium electricity?

What do you get if you pay extra?

Gate to the LBJ boyhood house. High security, yes?

The observant among you will notice that I finally got a haircut. 

Belinda tells me I look meaner with short hair....

Some observations after having walked around for a few weeks with a fixed, 35mm lens camera.

I stopped by the edge of the pedestrian bridge to watch dogs

and their people in this dog park. It's a popular spot for canines and their 

charges at the end of the day. As I was standing with my camera this particular 

dog seemed to notice that I was unsupervised and took it upon herself

to come over and keep me company. She sniffed me and then sat down

on the wall next to me and waiting until I finished looking at the action.

I said "Goodbye" and she nodded and trotted right back to her 

pet human. It was... comforting.

I think I finally figured out why I fought so hard against adapting the Fuji X-100V in one of its prior incarnations. They all seemed a bit tinny and thin when I handled them and the human/camera interface always seemed a kind of clunky and counter-intuitive. But I've decided all of that changed with the current model of the camera. It feels solid and well built. It's nicer to hold and shoot with. And at 26 megapixels, instead of 12 or 16, I actually feel comfortable enough cropping the frame to get a bit closer to a 40 mm angle of view. 

The thing is, my first "real" camera, bought with my hard-earned money, was the Canon Canonet G-III QL (the QL stood for "quick load") and it was a camera that quickly became about as transparent as a camera could be. I bought mine in 1976 and I still have it right here. It's about as solid as I imagine a camera could be, and the 40mm f1.7 lens on the front of it was sharp and at the same time voluptuous. I shot prodigious amounts of black and white film through that little camera and focusing with a bright line rangefinder was as natural as walking. I learned everything I ever needed to know about photography with that camera in my hands, or nearby. 

It's still here in the studio long after a raft of M series Leica cameras and lenses have come and gone. It's my "reference standard" for what a good, all around, affordable street shooting camera should be. I took it to Europe in 1978 for a multi-month backpacking trip and the only bother was replacing the PX 625 battery that powered the meter and made auto exposure (shutter priority) available. But the camera was and is fully functional without its battery; you just have to know how to estimate exposures in your head. And, as to "build quality" it is still fully functional today, forty four years after I bought it brand new from Capitol Camera, here in Austin. Sad though. The camera is still here but one of my favorite cameras stores is long gone.

Subconsciously, I guess I just kept making a comparison between the older Canon rangefinder, film camera and all the previous generations of X100 cameras from Fuji and the Fujis always came out on the losing end of the comparison. I never thought about my affinity for the Canonet until yesterday when I was looking for an old Nikon F camera body in the "film" drawer and stumbled back across it. In an instant I realized why I have always been uninterested in the Fujis. They had a lens that was just a bit too wide for me at the time and a sensor that was just too low res to consider cropping tight portraits at 50mm, 60mm and 70mm. It's different now. The crop is no big deal with the right sensor. I frame tight and a bit of crop adds up to "just right."

I've also found, when looking through the photos I've been taking in the last few weeks that I'm finally learning to come to grips with the 35mm focal length as it is. While I think Fuji "should" have made this line of cameras with a 40mm lens instead I get that I'm a bit of an outlier where focal length choices are concerned. But the camera is wearing my focal length prejudice down; bit by bit. Frame by frame.

One of the things I'm enjoying with the X-100V is that the lens, when used as I like to use it, is wonderfully sharp and holds up well with a bit of cropping. The images that are cropped to a 40 or 50mm frame don't seem degraded or less technically sound to me. 

On another note, I thought after having used EVFs for such a long time now that I would be most comfortable framing and shooting with the EVF engaged but that's not how things have shaken out. I've been using the OVF with the bright frame lines almost exclusively and I love it. There is an emotional connection to the rangefinder aesthetic that I find comfortable and, for me, saturated with a nostalgic and lovely remembering of my first embrace of photography. Can't explain it better than that but every peek through the bright line finder takes me right back to my time first photographing the people who have been most important in my life. 

I haven't begun to dive into the depths of the X-100V's capabilities; I like using the camera in much the same way I used my old Canonet, but I am lowering myself into its clutches the way one sinks slowly and carefully into a really hot bath. I love the Astia profile for color shooting and I've tweaked the Acros profile to get black and white images I like. I have the important controls set up to the buttons that make sense. I can quickly click the ND filter in and out. The aperture ring around the lens is exactly where it should be.

I bought a small, canvas Domke camera bag last week. I was looking for a small bag and I found this one lightly used at Precision Camera (with which I have no affiliate relationship, all cash goes in only one direction...). It's just the right size to hold one black and one chrome X-100V camera, with their metal lens hoods attached, along with a couple of extra batteries and a little box that contains the original lens rings and lens caps. I can hardly wait to do at a trip somewhere to make photographs with just the "twins" and nothing else. Seems like the perfect cameras for exploring the world. 

All of a sudden I'm not concentrating on small details but I'm actually 

enjoying taking in wider landscapes. Even if they are desolate and cluttered.

I'm not sure why but I'm currently fixated with any sort of back light. 

I was just a little disappointed not to get enough lens flare on this one.

I guess that's the trade off. A better lens cheats you out of 

tasty abberations. I guess a couple fingerprints on the front 

element would fix that right up....

 

Choosing how to get back to work. The contemporary dilemma for a generation of freelance artists.

I've walked across this bridge hundreds of times and never 

experienced the reflected light off an apartment building shining directly 

across the lake this way. It was exciting. I'm glad I thought  to bring a camera.

In a little over a month and a half we'll be coming up on the first anniversary of the pandemic in the USA.

When the news first started breaking we were expecting the first few months to be bad but we calculated that if we all wore our masks and stayed home for a couple of months we'd keep the curve of the spread low and give our health care professionals time to work out live saving best practices to keep deaths at a minimum then, we presumed, we start getting back to more normal routines. Few expected things would be much, much worse nearly a year down the road.

I think many businesses have determined that they now must get back to work, aggressively, as soon as possible, if they are going to survive. It's very much an existential dilemma.

The choices seem to be to shut everything down and watch your business collapse and die or risk going full blast and potentially contracting Covid-19 and then collapsing and dying --- personally. 

I'm old enough not to have to make these kinds of life and death choices. I can decide to retire from the field if I feel the personal risk is too great. I assume most readers here are either retired or have put away enough to do so. But what about the younger photographers and videographers who must work to survive financially?

It's interesting to see the host of "over 60" retirees talk with authority about "making the right choice and "hibernating" until everyone is vaccinated but it's rightly compassionate to realize that, statistically, quite few people can actually choose "the extended vacation" option offered by not working and not having income.

What would I do if I was once again 35, had a recently acquired mortgage, and had recently added a new child to the family? 

Many smart photographers had money in the bank for emergencies but who could have predicted that they would still be hampered from working almost a year later? I would presume, by this point in time, that I would have already used up most, if not all, of my non-retirement savings and I'd be digging into my SEP now. 

In our society, with few and tattered safety nets for the self-employed, I would have made the decision that working would be necessary, not just preferable. I would not consider losing the house or giving up my family's standard of living without a fight. But I want to get back to work as safely and sustainably as humanly possible. 

On the other hand, if I had an enormous trust fund I would begin my new career as a "fine art" photographer or novelist. Ah. If only we could all have been born into families that were comfortably ensconced in the one percent zone!

So, for most of us it would boil down to choosing option #1. Back to work as safely as possible. 

But, how to do it?

I'd say that your first and best move would be to create a sound working safety methodology and write down how your will operate, in the future, with clients. How you would operate in a new environment of commercial engagements.

Having written and shared policies is the best way to avoid slipping back into cutting corners, getting complacent, allowing clients to erode your procedures out of a misplace sense of economics, or for expediency's sake. Being able to fall back on your company's policies is something every business client will at least understand and it could help prevent them from pressuring you to take unnecessary chances. 

I would suggest operating with a healthy dollop of paranoia; along the lines of thinking that everyone I might come across on the job is a potential vector for infection!

This all calls for a re-doubling of your efforts to always follow universal best practices in dealing with Covid. No hand shaking. Control the number of people allowed on your set. Make sure everyone who is not actively in front of the camera being recorded is properly masked. Enforce proper mask wearing: the masks must go OVER the nose (not under) and extend down to the chin. No bandanas, just masks. A we'll bring extras in case anyone "forgets" to bring one. These rules must extend all the way up to the CEO and the company's roster of "heavy hitters." 

The higher most people rise on the corporate "food chain" the higher the probability that they are greater than average risk-takers. You don't want them sharing the results of their risk tolerance with you and your family. 

Have a plan to keep people well separated and make it a rule not to set up in small rooms or work in them for any amount of time. The "plan", written down and shared with clients gives you the authority to enforce your rules. After all, if the client signs off on your plan it becomes part of your agreement, part of your contract with them. If they traditionally relied on you to be responsible for the outcome of each shoot you have a right to rely on them to make each shoot safe. 

Part of my plan, should I go back and start working on commercial projects again is to have the right PPE. The single biggest personal protection device we use right now is the face mask. 

I have three different kinds of masks. I use a three ply, cloth mask when I am "off duty" and walking around outside with a camera. These are for times when I'm outside, walking alone on sparsely populated city sidewalks and quite capable of avoiding coming anywhere near six feet of other people. Low population density in downtown is achievable right now in Austin because the vast majority of the people who worked in the big office buildings are still working from home. Most of the people I see in the downtown space are masked. That's certainly true of the tech workers who have much to lose; if I do see unmasked people they are invariably tourists from less progressive towns. Mostly, I assume, Fox News watchers...

I have boxes of the ubiquitous light blue "procedure" masks that are three ply and meant to be single use masks. I use these for trips to the grocery store (our Trader Joe's is still mandating masks, with no exceptions, and also requiring density control in the stores. You might have to wait in a socially distanced line to get in but you will have the assurance that you are a hell of a lot safer than you would be in a grocery store that's regressed to an all comers group scrum. I also keep a box of these blue masks in the car and provide them to anyone I might be meeting with or working with outdoors. 

Then I have a supply of readily available, non-medical, N-95 masks that fit tight and purport to filer out 95% of...everything, all the way down to 2.5 microns. I stocked them in anticipation of projects where I'll be a client's facility, working on a portrait set up or some sort of environmental imaging. Even though they are well made and fit well wearing on of these N-95 rated masks doesn't obviate the need to follow all the other rules.

There are some clients I don't think I'd want to handle right now. These would include clients bent on doing traditional, convention style gatherings (shows, trade events, etc.) Nor would I want to photograph in occupied classrooms or other tighter, static places. 

If a client or one of their employees violates my company mask policy I'll ask nicely, once, for them to fix the problem and comply.  At the next infraction I'll be packing up my gear and heading out the door.

I'll relax a bit after I get both doses of a vaccine (can I please have the Johnson & Johnson version?) but will continue to mask up to help insure I don't become and inadvertent carrier. 

If we set firm rules and are willing to enforce them with no exceptions I believe we can return to doing certain kinds of work. The biggest rules are to limit the number of people in any area, make sure everyone is suitably masked, and to limit the amount of time spent in any interior space. 

If I were asked to make portraits for a law firm I would want them to schedule one or two people on days when everyone else in the office is working from home. If the firm is closed over the weekends and we want to do environmental shots in the offices then a Saturday or Sunday makes much better sense. 

The thing I dread is clients pushing to do too many people in too big a rush. We're going to have to train them to think more about safety and a bit less about efficiency. At least until everyone is safely vaccinated. 

I think many, many older photographers (over 40) are already economic victims of the pandemic and have or will have to leave the field. When the economy recovers it might be an unwelcome burden to try and rebuild a clientele from scratch. With a huge number of knowledgable workers pushed out of their industry a quick recovery in a year or so will find a vacuum for skilled photographers. It's the ebb and flow of a market disrupted by events beyond our control. 

But if you are going to serve the market right now you owe it to yourself, your peers, your competitors and your families to understand the risks and to minimize them in every way you can. Work healthy by design. It beats the crap out of dying. 

Just a few thoughts I had while waiting for my local Subaru dealer to service my car. I actually went long hand today. I brought a notebook and a ballpoint pen. Refreshing to go "old school" for a blog. 

 

Another little part of traditional imaging crumbled off the structure of photography. Costco kills the in-store printing departments at 800 stores.

For the first twenty years of my photography career everything (EVERYTHING) revolved around the darkroom and the making of good prints. When I first started out I rented time in a co-op darkroom we set up in the Farah Fawcett's old room in what used to be a sorority house, just West of the UT campus. The Tri-Delts had long since vacated the complex and it was, during my time there, the Ark Co-op. For a while I lived at the co-op while student-ing at UT. And I mostly lived there to be close to the darkroom that we helped build.

That's where I learned to roll film onto reels, develop the film, make contact sheets and, finally make the best double weight fiber, black and white prints I possibly could. In those days every available dollar (and they were few and far between) was spent on printing paper and bulk black and white film. If the sign up sheet didn't exist I could have spent weeks in that small, dark space. That space with the ungrounded paper drier that routinely shocked the crap out of me if I forgot and touched it while printing barefoot. 

When I built out my dream studio in 1988 the biggest expense in the whole 3000 square feet of the project was the darkroom. I equipped it with a Leica Focomat V35 enlarger for printing 35mm and half frame film, and an Omega D5 enlarger for 4x5 and medium format film. One of my favorite productivity tools was my sodium vapor safelight. Oh, and my Advent Radio. 

Eventually we started embracing digital cameras and the enlargers were only important for making prints from my "legacy" negatives. When we built the current office/studio on the same property as our new house in West Austin (1996) I opted to sell off the darkroom equipment and make do with a series of film scanners. It was a reasonable compromise since I didn't want to plumb another space and so much of our work was already moving to digital. That, and the fact that medium format transparencies had become far more relevant to the business than B&W prints; at least from about 1994 onward. No more need or desire to rush through black and white prints overnight for clients on short deadlines. The labs took care of our medium format transparencies and I finally got dinners with my family back.

By the turn of the century I'd already spent way too much time and money trying to make inkjet printers a viable option for turning out color prints when one of my associates mentioned that he was getting great prints from a store called, Costco. The first Costco had opened in Austin and soon people all over the place were singing the praises of their photo department. 12 x18 inch chemical prints for about $2. The "Two Buck Chuck of Prints!"

I tried out the in-store Costco labs and liked them. I liked them even better when they started profiling each store's printing machines and then sharing the color profiles with their customers. Then the prints got really good. Or, if they weren't good it was generally my fault. Chalk it up to early days of monitor calibration....

I've probably had printed something like a thousand of the 12 x18 inch prints over the first decade of the 2000's. We used to make and send printed portfolios and often needed to have four or five available for different client requests. We supplied wall prints from Costco to commercial and non-profit clients who wanted to decorate their offices with the work I'd done for them. 

I even used their printing/proofing services for event work. I'd shoot on 35mm Kodak Ektapress 400 film and have my local Costco photo department proof 30 or 40 X 36 exposure rolls for a given event, put the resulting 4x6 inch prints into binders and deliver them to my clients. 

Once, I was covering an event for Motorola in Orlando, Florida when my direct client got tasked with setting up a celebrity grip and grin photo session (not on the original schedule...) for about 200 people; all V.I.P.s in the eyes of the company. She promised her boss that we could get the film processed and get back one 5x7 inch color print of each of the 200 participants standing next to the celebrity by 6 am the next morning. 

I called around and found the local Costco and got the location. We did the fast breaking photo shoot from 2-3pm and then I grabbed a limo at the front of the Ritz-Carlton and rushed over to Costco. I handed over seven rolls of 35mm film and asked the lab manager if it would be possible to get them at any time up to the end of that day. He laughed and said, "Go shop around the store for a while, give me your cell number and I'll call you when they're ready. Maybe an hour?"  By 5:30 I was back at the conference with an envelope full of really nice 5x7 inch prints. My client was thrilled because she and her staff had also been tasked with stuffing the images into hastily purchased picture frames and getting them delivered to the clients before they left in the morning. 

I was loyal to Costco for the bulk of my commercial printing ever since that day. 

Now, that's about to come to an end. The labs are being shut down and the space will no doubt be relegated to something more profitable. According to the Costco press release the number of people asking for lab services had fallen dramatically and quickly to a point where the service was no longer profitable. Most people are happy to "archive" their images to their phones. Printing is now unimportant to the vast majority of shoppers.

Costco did mention that members who still want prints can get them from Costco's online print service. But it's not the same thing as being able to walk in with film and walk out with prints. Or to send in a set of digital files and pick them up the same day, along with your roasted chicken and 55 gallon barrel of pickles. 

Every day the remnants of traditional photograph disappear or are diminished. Sure, there are still a number of online printing services available and, if I need prints in the future, I'll probably just order them through Smugmug.com since I also use their service to make online galleries for current clients. But again, it's not the same. If you need something re-done, or done differently, it's hard to explain to a web interface just what you had in mind. 

As prints go away it changes the nature of what we do for our craft. And the tools we need to use. Does super-high resolution matter as much in a time when nearly everything is viewed on a screen? And when the most popular screens are no bigger than about 13 inches? I know most of us still make prints but then what?

Will the generations right behind us consider printing?

I guess I was hanging onto my Costco membership mostly because I thought I might need some prints from time to time. I have't been in a big box store since the earliest days of the pandemic so I'm thinking this might be a good time to drop my membership. With just the three of us here at the house it's rare that we can make it all the way through a ten pound apple pie, and we only need so many large screen TVs. 

But there are those good deals on tires.... I guess I'll give it a bit more thought.

 

Why I have absolutely no interest in acquiring a medium format digital camera at this time.

 Just for info here's what I wrote about MF digital cameras back in 2012:

A reader of the VSL blog recently wrote to suggest, after reading my post about photographing Lou with my film Hasselblad, that I try out a medium format digital camera before making the assessment about which path will ultimately yield better results. I thought I would remind my readers that I've been down that road before, for months at a time, and with three different systems. In 2009 and 2010 Studio Photographer Magazine commissioned me to test and write about three of the MF digital cameras that were just coming on to the market.  My two most memorable tests were of the Leaf AFi7 with a 39 megapixel back and the Phase One 45+ because, at the time, they were the state of the art.

I also reviewed the less expensive Mamiya entry MF digital camera.

Once you got over the fact that you'd just signed for a $45,000 system (when the two delivered lenses are factored in) the Leaf camera was nice.  It made beautiful files.  The 180mm f2.8 Schneider lens was superb.  It gave really nice out of focus performance and even better in focus performance.  But it's autofocus was slow like paint drying and the tandem batteries in the camera and grip did their best to die often, and always out of sync.  Would I still be shooting with the camera if someone bestowed it upon me for free?  Yes.  Was the calculus there for me to buy it and make more money with it? No.

The Phase One was as close to being the perfect medium format digital system I've shot with so far. The camera is much lighter and better set up than the Leaf and the lenses+body were small enough and light enough to be used handheld and to be carried around town.

The Mamiya was heading in the right direction price wise and I thought the files were just fine.

But with each of these cameras I kept coming back to the idea that I could dump the $25,000 or more into film and processing with cameras I already owned and get files that were just as good.  And I could side step the handling and battery problems. The bottom line is that my clients didn't need the bigger files and I didn't need the additional expense.  Not in the middle of the great recession...

At the time the medium format digital cameras were ponderous and pricy beasts. They were also slow and mostly used CCD sensors which made them gluttonous battery hogs. But they did have some redeeming attributes such as true 16 bit color capture. I also used one of the Aptus II 80 Meg backs (33 by 54mm) on a Mamiya camera and that convinced me that the smaller sized MF sensors (32 x43 etc.) were mostly a small bit different than 35mm and more of a compromise than a real upgrade. 

So, recently two of my photographer friends bought current, entry level medium format cameras. Both bought Fuji GFX 50Rs. One friend, who doesn't shoot for a living, is very happy with his purchase and posts about it frequently. My other friend is a hard core professional who has shot with a previous, larger format Hasselblad MF digital system and he also shot for several years with the Leica S2 MF system. He used the 50R for a couple of weeks and immediately put it up for sale. Why? Because if you are already shooting with a Nikon D850 or an Z7, a Lumix S1R, or Sony's new A7RIV camera (and the best lenses you can lay your hands on) you're probably not going to see much difference between those and the files from the 50R. The lower pixel density might give a different impression of sharpness but there's really not enough difference in the sensor geometry to get you the kinds of wonderful out-of-focus backgrounds we loved film MF for so long ago. 

Shoot your 35mm, high res cameras at one stop further open than your smaller MF sensor cameras like the HBlad X1-D or the Fuji GFX'ers and you'll pretty much match the focus fall off between the two formats. If you are buying the very best lenses for your particular system they'll probably be equally sharp at the corresponding f-stops.

I was offered a Fuji 50R camera with the 50mm f3.5 lens, three batteries and some extras for the very sensible price of $3500 but I still can't see the value of that camera over the performance of the Lumix S1R for my work. That, and the fact that we'd be right down the same rabbit hole of buying lots of new and overlapping lenses, batteries, etc. for very little (if any) gain. 

Yeah, you might see some differences if you routinely print very large but I'd guess that most of the raves about the pixie MF format images is all about the quality of the lenses more so than it really is about the sensor or the color science being lightyears better than that in the slightly smaller 35mm format.

No, I'm keeping my powder dry when it comes to the MF digitals. I'm holding out for larger sensor sizes (not more resolution, just more real estate). Now... I know it's probably not going to come from Fuji since they are three models and many lenses deep in a commitment to the smaller MF format. Hasselblad is all over the map but their only affordable MF system cameras are also of the pixie sensor variety. You'll still have to cough up good used car budgets for their larger sensor cameras. 

I'd much rather spend the extra money (is "extra" money really a thing?) buying supremely good lenses and putting them on very high res 35mm bodies than buy into what I consider to be a compromise format. 

But you could look at this from another direction. If you don't do this for a living and you do want to carry a camera around that makes super good images, and you want a different look to your images, and you don't currently own a camera I'd argue that one of the Fuji or Hblad cameras might be a heck of a lot of fun. Just doesn't make sense in this era of lockdowns, diminished engagements and limited opportunities to make commercial images with. Not for me anyway. And I saved $3500 into the bargain. 

About half the price of a decent 50mm Leica lens... Oh boy.

Got some color from Monday's late afternoon walk with the Sigma fp and the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.7. Thought it was nice.

A last look at downtown's edge before getting back in my car and heading home.

Low light, hand held. Happiness.