Portrait of Hope Sonam [Zack Arias's Medium Format Night]

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    From the photoblog on 05/12/2012:

    SEE the FULL resolution image HERE.

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    Yesterday, I attended Zack Arias's Medium Format Night. Coming into the evening, I knew almost nothing about shooting medium format, so the event was a great learning experience.

    Here is how Zack described the event:You may say that you aren’t interested in medium format. Or you may be but it’s a number of years ahead in your future. Come on out and play around anyway and have a few drinks with all of us. You may hate medium format because you think the D800 is just as good. You’re still welcome to come. I promise you this won’t be a used car lot environment where someone is trying to sell you something everywhere you turn. It’s simply an event I myself wish I could have gone to. At Zack's studio last night, there were four different areas in which people could go to and take some photos (three sets with models posing throughout the night plus an extra set for a still life shoot).

    The photo seen in today's image is one of Hope Sonam, a singer/songwriter from Atlanta. She was a lot of fun to photograph, if this Instagram photo can serve as a guide.

    My big takeaway from the event was that shooting with these medium format cameras isn't that much different than shooting with your regular dSLR (I shoot with the Canon 5D Mark II). It's the post-processing and management of the immense files that requires (a lot of) thought.

    I was absolutely blown away by the amount of detail captured by the Phase One camera used to capture this photograph. We're talking about 80 megapixel shots, which when uncompressed into TIFF, become staggering 240MB files. If you convert to 16-bit TIFF, each file can easily top 500MB in size.

    Zack talked about pixel peeping on his blog, and pixel peep we did. There were large monitors at the studio and we looked at photos at 100% (1:1) resolution. For those of you at home, I have uploaded the full, unadjusted JPEG on Flickr. To get the JPEG output, I used Capture One software to output the proprietary RAW file into an 8-bit TIFF file, which I opened in Photoshop CS5. I then saved it as a JPEG file using Photoshop's default conversion (output quality was the maximum 12). The only difference between the original uploaded on Flickr and the image I have posted here on the blog is that I did a selective curves adjustment on Hope's eyes to bring out the whites.

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