Twenty years ago, before I purchased my first SLR camera, Canon Rebel 2000, an old friend, my college roommate had pointed me an humorous online article [1] about the danger of entering into photography — it will be a long and costly journey. At the moment, I didn’t think too much about the warning signs ahead of me. But today, I come to report that everything told in that article became true.
If there is one takeaway in the article that has left the deepest impression to me, it is the size of the photographic negative decides the most about image quality. In order to pursue better image quality, starting from 35mm film camera, I’ve come through Xpan, 645, and 66 medium format cameras. But there is always a dream hidden in my heart — large format.
Large format is the ultimate crown jewelry. After two decades of photography, I finally step into this world, and purchased my first large format camera, the Intrepid Mark IV 4×5 field camera. I used it once during the recent trip to Eastern Sierra, and took the picture, North Lake Morning Reflection, with two sheets of Ilford Delta 100 4×5 black and white film. The result is phenomenon — the amount of details captured by this primitive camera far exceeds the pictures made by state-of-the-art Nikon D850 digital SLR camera. Please forgive the small picture shared here. It does not do justification to the real image.
[1] https://www3.xitek.com/papers/viewfinder/viewfinder1.htm
