Help with choosing a camera, probably MF.

Peltigera said:

Square is certainly not seen by artists in general as a good format for a picture and I cannot see a camera manufacturer coming up with square on artistic grounds.

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I shoot these days mostly 35 mm, 6x6 and 4x5 (and like the 4x5-8x10 ratio the most). To me the square represents an inherent dynamism, and I feel an image that is composed as square instead of more rectangular can often carry a bit more tension in it while for example an 8x10 landscape can be calm and peaceful, image content apart, but this will sound like overgeneralization, too.

I had a discussion about the square format with a graphic artist the other day after I saw her new series was all on 22x22 cm plates. She loved the square format.

My preference for the strong square is the reason I'm not getting a 645 camera: I would always miss a little on the sides or the top and bottom.

It's very easy to find some highly successful square images both in the APUG gallery and elsewhere.

It can be very hard to get people to read what you write. I did NOT say no one had ever made a square picture before 6x6 120 film format was invented. I said it was not generally seen as a good format.

"If you're going to make an assertion that squares are not good for art, back it up."
Should I ever be moved to make that assertion, young TheFlyingCamera, I will most certainly back it up. In the mean time, learn to read!

A visit to any painting gallery will easily reveal that the rectangular format it's the preferred one by artists of the last centuries. Square format exists, but it is not widespread. Oval and round paintings exist as well, but they are somehow exceptions to the rule.

The "portrait" and "landscape" orientations probably come from painters parlance. Painted portraits of 1 persons are usually in portrait orientation and landscapes are usually in landscape orientation. Think Monna Lisa or the Supper at Emmaus as just bare examples. Artists seems to have always had a strong preference for some form of "orientation" when painting on canvas even though it would have been quite easy to make a square work. (Paintings on plates are obviously round, and the tondo itself is not a rare form of "orientation", but certainly is not common). This is seen all over the world: Chinese or Japanese prints, for what I recall, also tend to have a rectangular shape (either portrait or landscape depending on the subject).

Probably painting formats influenced photography formats, although it is much easier to crop a photographic print than a canvas, especially after you painted it .

So I think it can be said with confidence that when photography reached commercial maturity let's say at the end of the XIX century the LF cameras had a roughly square format but ultimately the final product was normally either a portrait to hang on a wall (probably vertical) or a portrait of several persons, a family group to be hanged on a wall (probably horizontal). Or maybe a landscape (probably horizontal) or architectural work (orientation depending on subject, but normally either landscape or portrait). Portraits though were probably the large part of the photographer's commissioned job, by far. Single portraits (portrait) or group portraits (landscape). Just as it ever was in painting.

If you commission a portrait of yourself to a photographer - as an alternative to the commission to a painter - you expect somehow a result which is related to the painted portrait. The pose, the composition, the attitude of the photographic portraits are not radically different from those of the painted portraits. Photographers inherited the painters "language" and with it they inherited the sense of orientation, although with photography they could have easily chosen any form or shape.

It's possible to make a photographic portrait inside a complex leaf shape paper such as an oak leave, but photographers never really exploited this flexibility they have at hand, probably because they remained "bound" to the painting "language".

Looking at old prints, stamps and paintings one very often see an orientation. The square format in the final product is, if not rare, at least uncommon.

A LF camera cannot be easily tilted sideway and from LF (with its "roughly square" film formats) to MF the idea that the image on film is square and the final product is probably either portrait or landscape was I think quite natural and instinctive in any photographer of the time.

Paper is not sold in square format for a reason! If and when you need a square image, you crop the paper. But normally you would need a rectangular paper (which doesn't rule out some further cropping for compositional reasons).

Oscar Barnack cameras didn't force "orientation" and the need to think in terms of orientation. Orientation was probably in the mind of every photographer since the birth of photography. The small format can be markedly rectangular just because somehow for the first time in photographic history it was very easy to orient the camera without clumsiness.

I think it's also interesting that cinema, even though probably or possibly begun in square format, soon developed into landscape mode, and even panoramic mode, reinforcing IMO the idea that the square format is not favoured by image creators (unless they have a specific compositional reason to prefer the square format).

Fabrizio

EDIT Maybe one of the reasons of the scarce success of the 126 format among advanced amateurs was that in a small camera the square format makes no sense, as it is easy to turn the camera on one side. This could be an indirect "proof" that the photographer normally thinks in terms of "orientation" in any case.

Diapositivo: That doesn't explain the insane success of the Diana and Holga that exclusively shoots in squares.

The "insane success" is very hard to explain to my mind, with or without the square format.

The insane success of Holga and Diana is explained by human insanity

Well, their format is not more square than that of a Rolleiflex or a Hasselblad with a 6x6 back.

Thanks for your help all. I haven't purchased yet but I've started looking for a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II kit. The rotating back is a nice option. They also make a 6x6 back, so I can play with that format. They make a tilt-shift adapter and there's a tilt-shift lens available, if I want to play with that. It seems like they're readily available and I've found someone that services them. The price point is mid range of the options I was looking at. Anyway, thanks again.

Peltigera said:

I cannot provide evidence of my assertion and do not have the time to research it. My understanding is that the square format was introduced for TLR cameras that cannot sensibly be used on their side. Whose intent? I suspect Franke & Heidecke came up with the idea. Were there 6x6 cameras before the Rolleiflex? Square is certainly not seen by artists in general as a good format for a picture and I cannot see a camera manufacturer coming up with square on artistic grounds.

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The square format predates Franke & Heidecke by decades. The 101 (1895), 106 (1898), and 117 (1900) roll film formats were all square. 101 and 106 were 3 1/4 x 3 1/4, 117 is 2 1/4 x 2 1/4. The cameras that used them were box cameras, not TLRs. Franke & Heidecke didn't produce a camera until 1929.

Your understanding is mistaken, and your assertion is without basis.

Can I throw in my 2 cents? Over the last 40 years I've shot just about every format there is from Minox to split 5x7. If you like the feel and spontenaity of the 35mm equipment I'd recommend a 645 camera shooting 120 film. They are light weight and handle like a 35mm but give you a large negative to print. The 6x6 format is great but definatly different from the 35mm and 645. Since you get fewer shots on a roll and the neagative is square, you tend to spend more time thinking about what you are doing to maxamize your efforts. Thus, I always found 6x6 better for studio, portrait, wedding and landscape photography. 6x7 format wasn't much different except the equipment gets bigger and heavier but the negative is astounding. I read somewhere on the net that a 6x7 neg is equivalent to 200 megapixels in digital format! Beyond these formats you are getting into view camera territory with sheet film, film holders, etc. A 4x5 view camera will really slow you down and make you use your creative juices as this is not a cheap format to play with. Although I've used many different cameras and formats professionally, I'd have to say some of my best work came from a Nikon F2 and a Mamiya C330 TLR. I'm currently shooting with an RB67, an old Minolta SRT102 and a Sony DSLR. Have fun with whatever you decide on. Remember it's not the camera, it's the photographer that counts.

I would hazard a guess that the most popular square format of all, by a huge margin (based on numbers of photographs taken), was the 126 Instamatic.

People didn't want to be bothered by having to turn the camera sideways, and they didn't have to.

Square means one doesn't have to turn the camera - one just crops afterwards if one wants rectangular.

And it is easier to design a camera for a square format then one that has to be turned sideways from time to time.

Unless of course one designs in a rotating back of course

kbrede said:

Thanks for your help all. I haven't purchased yet but I've started looking for a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II kit. The rotating back is a nice option. They also make a 6x6 back, so I can play with that format. They make a tilt-shift adapter and there's a tilt-shift lens available, if I want to play with that. It seems like they're readily available and I've found someone that services them. The price point is mid range of the options I was looking at. Anyway, thanks again.

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Just to throw another one at you, the Bronica GS-1 is the smallest and lightest of the 6x7cm cameras. It is readily hand-holdable and has modern electronics for control of the camera (which you may or may not want) and a well-damped mirror. A couple of the lenses are tough to find (80mm and 500mm) and the system has 6x7, 6x6 and 6x4.5 120 and 220 backs. The AE finder brings shutter priority autoexposure and its meter is accurate. I haul mine with 3 or 4 lenses around when hiking here in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana (and even Yosemite a couple of times), bad knees and all . No tilt-shift lenses, but they are all leaf-shutters with 1/500" max and 16" min with the AE finder (plus B and T). A very nice system and the optics are top-shelf. The biggest downer for me is the rather poor MFD common to most leaf-shutter lenses, but there are 18mm and 36mm extension tubes available, too. Cable release is electronic and I just use my old Canon release with it.

Yes the 126 format was "popular" (my first camera was an Instamatic 36 which I still have) but it never reached, as I said, the "advanced amateur", meaning camera makers such as Minolta, Pentax, Nikon, Canon, or Leica etc. never bothered with the format or at least never bothered to make a SLR with interchangeable lens for the 126 format, which is a square format.

Maybe the fact that the format was square had an influence in the scarce success of 126 between SLR users or the perceived risk of scarce success among SLR producers.

On the other hand, the square format (6 x 6) it's probably the most diffused format for medium format cameras: Rolleiflex and derivatives, Hasselblad and derivatives. That IMHO reinforces the opinion that photographers tend to think in "portrait" or "landscape" when studying a composition. With a Rolleiflex or a Hasselblad the composition takes into account the cropping which is going to be applied to the shot.

Rotating the camera with a waist-level finder is certainly not impossible but it's not practical either, especially on a tripod while doing studio work. So with those cameras somehow cropping is taken into account at the moment of composition. I think this can be said as we don't see Rolleiflex users or Hasselblad users producing a lot of square formats as a rule, or producing more square images than the average photographers, that's my impression at least.

This constant need to crop leads to some "wasted film estate". That is more acceptable with 6x6 with a fairly large negative anyway, but was probably considered unfortunate on a small format like 126 where the starting negative is small.

Besides, cameras like Rolleiflex or Hasselblads were used, I guess, mostly by people who would print their images themselves (contact printing if nothing else). So it was always possible to crop the final image to landscape or portrait as initially devised. Typically they were the instrument of wedding photographers, paparazzi etc, and were used in a professional context.

It is said that paparazzi favoured the 6x6 format because although magazines tend not to publish square pictures, for the page composer it's easier to have a square format so that they have a choice whether to give a horizontal or vertical orientation to the shot at the page composing stage (which can easily be done with a paparazzo shot as normally you have the subject in the centre and the rest is filling for the page composer).
Even if the picture has a somehow tilted horizon (as it can frequently happen in paparazzo action) the image would have been easily cropped to redress it. This is done with less chances of success if the format is rectangular I do believe.

With the 126 format people would normally bring the photographs to the shop and so would be "stuck" with the square format for each image, the alternative being using the scissors...

Medium format cameras with rectangular format (4,5 x 6, or 6 x 9) don't have a waist-level finder for the reason that it would make the use of the camera quite clumsy I do believe.

So I agree with the idea expressed by Peltigera in post #3 that - as a general rule - using a 6x6 waist-level finder somehow implies taking into account some cropping at composition time. I never had a MF camera which I used but if I had one I would "crop in my mind" most shots I do believe.

And the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the 126 format couldn't work for SLR users for the very reason that it is a small and square format.

SkipA said:

The square format predates Franke & Heidecke by decades. The 101 (1895), 106 (1898), and 117 (1900) roll film formats were all square. 101 and 106 were 3 1/4 x 3 1/4, 117 is 2 1/4 x 2 1/4. The cameras that used them were box cameras, not TLRs. Franke & Heidecke didn't produce a camera until 1929.

Your understanding is mistaken, and your assertion is without basis.

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And the box cameras that used these film formats? Did they have the two viewfinders that a box camera requires to be used with an oblong format? I'm sorry, your quoting a number of square format films does not mean my understanding is mistaken. It just means the date was earlier than I thought. And it certainly does not mean my assertion was without basis - I provided the basis with my assertion.

Diapositivo said:

Rotating the camera with a waist-level finder is certainly not impossible but it's not practical either. So with those cameras somehow cropping is taken into account at the moment of composition. I think this can be said as we don't see Rolleiflex users or Hasselblad users producing a lot of square formats as a rule.

This leads to some "wasted film estate". That is more acceptable with 6x6 with a fairly large negative anyway, but was probably considered unfortunate on a small format like 126 where the starting negative is small.

Besides, cameras like Rolleiflex or Hasselblads were used, I guess, mostly by people who would print their images themselves (contact printing if nothing else). So it was always possible to crop the final image to landscape or portrait as initially devised.

With 120 people would normally bring the photographs to the shop and so would be "stuck" with the square format for each image, the alternative being using the scissors...

Medium format cameras with rectangular format (4,5 x 6, or 6 x 9) don't have a waist-level finder for the reason that it would make the use of the camera quite clumsy I do believe.

So I agree with the idea expressed by Peltigera in post #3 that - as a general rule - using a 6x6 waist-level finder somehow implies taking into account some cropping at composition time. I never had a MF camera which I used but if I had one I would "crop in my mind" most shots I do believe.

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Using a square format only implies cropping at composition time if that is what the photographer intends. Other photographers intend to compose in square format.

The creativity of your argments to support your narrow view of art is amusing to me.

Peltigera said:

And the box cameras that used these film formats? Did they have the two viewfinders that a box camera requires to be used with an oblong format? I'm sorry, your quoting a number of square format films does not mean my understanding is mistaken. It just means the date was earlier than I thought. And it certainly does not mean my assertion was without basis - I provided the basis with my assertion.

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The formats were square. The cameras built for those formats didn't capture an oblong format. Why would you put two viewfinders on a square format camera?

Here is your original assertion, in case you've forgotten:

Peltigera said:

The original idea of the 6x6 format was that you cropped the negative to 6x4.5. It was square so you could do both 6x4.5 landscape and 6x4.5 portrait without having to turn the camera on its side. It was never intended that you should keep the picture square and there is no reason why you should.

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What you offered as a basis is demonstrably untrue. For one thing, square format predates 6x6 and Franke and Heideke or TLRs by many years. And you have offered no evidence at all that the people who designed square formats intended users to crop them to oblong format, or that they designed them square so the camera wouldn't have to be turned on its side.

Unless you can provide evidence of that, you are making a baseless assertion.

thegman said:

My Fotoman 69 maxes out at 1/500, my Hasselblad did too.
In fact, I've never had a medium format camera which went any faster.

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The classic focal-plane Hasselblads went to 1/1000 or faster, depending on the model.

- Leigh

I'd rather have 1/400 leaf shutter than 1/1000 focal plane shutter, any day, without a second of doubt.

nicholai said:

I'd rather have 1/400 leaf shutter than 1/1000 focal plane shutter, any day, without a second of doubt.

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Interesting statement. Is there some reason?

- Leigh

SkipA said:

Using a square format only implies cropping at composition time if that is what the photographer intends. Other photographers intend to compose in square format.

The creativity of your argments to support your narrow view of art is amusing to me.

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I'm amused by your creativity in misunderstanding simple concepts.

Gentlemen, it would be about the time to stop this barely helpful discussion about square versus triangle and get politely back to the original topic.
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My €0.02 would be - if you want to photograph pretty much 'everything' than a simpler and robust MF SLR will not be abad choice. As long as you do not mind the weight (ever had a RB67 or Pentax 6x7 in hand?) you will be able of great results - all systems have lenses between very good and excellent.

Think whether you want/need built-in metering (or aperture priority) or not or what other features (waist level finder, ability to change film backs, lens speed & selection & price, ...) may be of interest to you. Check you budget too. The good point is - if you buy a reasonable setup and decide to sell it later you will not loose much cash.

Concerning the 1/500 top shutter speed - based on my experience with a TLR and Mamiya 6 - yes, it can be limiting if you find yourself shooting ISO400 film on a sunny day AND wanting to shoot with large aperture - in that case a ND (4x or 8x) filter can get you what you need. But mostly it is the other way round - you have ISO100 film, slow lens and it is dark and cloudy day and you left your tripod home again as it was too heavy to carry (been there, done that).

Concerning tripod - even though that pretty much any MF camera can be shot hand-held (and the rangefinders and TLRs are really easy to do), often a tripod is helpful to either allow for larger DOF or allow for longer lenses on a SLR (long lenses for MF SLRs are HEAVY) or get longer exposures.

Macro & TLR - indeed TLR is not a perfect tool for macro shots, but down to about 0.5 m using the version I adapters (I have Rolleiflex/Rolleicord cameras in mind here) you can get the job done without additional accessories with little bit of training.

My wild guess - if you think that 6x6 my not be your thing that starting with 645 SLR (Mamiya 645 Pro or Bronica ETRSi as Pentax 645 and Contax 645 are more expensive) might be a good choice. Surely - if you want to go for 6x7 do not let me stop you, but you not only gain larger negative, but also stronger mirror slap (what I read, not personal experience), larger weight and less photos per roll.
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Just to give you an idea on MF camera weights (includes film back and pentaprism finder for SLRs):
Mamiya Pro TL + 80/2.8: 1.8 kg (Pentax 645N and Contax 645 very similar)
Pentax 67 + 105/2.4: 2.3 kg (Bronica GS1 probably similar, RB67 is heavier as far as I recall)
Hasselblad SLRs - I do not know
Mamiya 6 (or 7) with 75/3.5 lens: 1.15 kg
Fuji GA645: 0.8 kg
Bessa III (Fuji GF670): 1.0 kg
Plaubel Makina 67/670: 1.3 kg
most TLRs: 0.9 - 1.3 (excludes Mamiya C models as those are heavier)


The differences between RF and SLR get bigger once you start to add additional lenses as the SLR lenses are heavier. I do not want to say you should not get an SLR, just to make you aware of the weight What is really cool about MF SLRs is the look through the viewfinder. I had briefly Pentax 645N and the viewfinder was just great.

And oc course - enjoy the process of choosing, buying, shooting and making nice prints

Once upon a time I would have thought worrying about weights was foolish. Now there is no chance of me buying a Pentax 67 - over 2kg hanging around my neck? No thank you.

nicholai said:

I'd rather have 1/400 leaf shutter than 1/1000 focal plane shutter, any day, without a second of doubt.

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I would as well. I must admit I have never used a high-end focal plane camera such as a Leica, but even my reasonably well designed and made Canon SLR produces a noticeable jar when you press the shutter release. I much prefer my Voigtlanders and their very slight whisper at the same point.

Peltigera said:

... even my reasonably well designed and made Canon SLR produces a noticeable jar when you press the shutter release.

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What you're feeling is the mirror movement.

Focal plane shutters are extremely light. That's a design requirement to meet performance goals.
In order to achieve rapid acceleration and deceleration, the mass of the curtains or blades must be very small.

- Leigh

The advantage of the leaf shutter to me is the flash sync - if I want fill-flash in daylight, it's hard to do it with a focal plane shutter, as most of them top out at 1/125th for flash sync. And most medium format focal plane shutters top out at 1/60th for flash sync.

Yep. Because of flash-sync. I barely ever need any faster. If there's too much light to do 1/400, ND filters work well.