[stan_rogers]

There is little I miss about shooting large format. The huge print thing really doesn't work; an enormous high-quality inkjet print from a sufficiently large sensor (60-80MP medium formatback, or a 200MP multi-shot back if the subject is stationary) will usually look better subjectively. (Sensors are flat. So are glass plates. Film seldom is.)

There are two ways in which shooting film can give objectively better results than shooting digitally. The first is that a Zone System practitioner can wring an exacting exposure from deepest shadows to highest highlights in a single shot. That's especially true when using sheet film (with roll film, you're pretty much stuck with one development for the roll unless you're quick with scissors and can do development by inspection). There are no alignment problems, no interpolation, and no de-ghosting to perform, just a hell of a lot of dodging and burning, note-taking and test prints. Combining Zone System shooting on film with good scans and digital manipulation and printing is, in a sense, getting the best of all worlds for enlargements. And if you shoot colour, it's really the only practical way to use the Zone System, since reciprocity failure between channels meant that wild dodging and burning was always a bit of a science experiment with filters, etc.

The second is contact printing. We are a long, long way from being able to produce digital prints that are even in the same ballpark. Yes, they're tiny and jewel-like (unless you're shooting really large formats like 1114 or 16x20), but they repay a close look with an astonishing detail and depth. Not quite as much as a high quality direct positive (a good Daguerreotype is almost unbelievable, even if you forget that it's probably on the order of 150 years old and was made with a lens that is absolute garbage by modern standards), but more than a little impressive nonetheless. A contact print (assuming the picture has artistic merit at all) can still suck me in for an extended stay in a way that no enlargement, dye sub or giclée can. Who knows? We might even have been there* digitally, except that our printers became literally good enough for most purposes a few years back; only a fanatical devotion to ecstatic experiences with small prints by someone in a position to produce a printer is ever going to change that.

[Nav_Panel]

I guess I'm a little spoiled by being at a university with a very expensive Hasselblad scanner that can actually pull that DPI without issues. I imagine it's much more challenging to achieve that resolution on a flatbed. However, if you have access to a facility that has a nice scanner, then it's probably much cheaper to simply scan your large format film than to purchase a digital back.

I would love to see some large format contact prints someday. It sounds incredible. An artist in the area was doing tintype portraits and I got to observe. I wish I remembered more of how it looked, but after a 6 second ("manually timed") exposure, the result was beautiful. I've always loved making small enlargement prints of my 35mm negatives, but being able to contact print sounds so valuable.

Do you ever miss the large format bodies, though?