About 25 years ago I took a workshop taught at the time by Marion Patterson a contemporary of Ansel Adams, who had worked for Virginia and Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and who was chair of the Foothill College photography program. (She began studies at the San Francisco Art Institute with such luminaries as Dorothea Lange and Minor White, as well.) Each student was asked to shoot during a class outing, to select three shots, and then to project them to the other workshop students later during the semester. I shot on 645 and projected shots to the same screen size as the 135 shooters using my medium format projector. So I had no advantage in image projection size. Nevertheless there was a noticable 'gasp' from the other class members at the visual impact of the medium format images, to which Ms. Patterson commented to the class about the quality achievable with medium format and why so many 135 shooters so often upgraded to medium format.
I remember the first time I took a workshop sponsored by Hasselblad and taught by photographer Ernst Wildi, and he projected slides taken with his Hasselblad. Indeed, it can be a stunning thing to see.
It is truly sad, with the demise of so many emulsions (including all of my favorites) and with the disappearance of quality E-6 processing labs, and the disappearance of processes like Cibachrome what has been happening in traditional film-based photography over the past 15 years.
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