Price comparing.

The more I look around on the net, the more I am coming to realize I may have gotten an insane deal on my Bronica. On Ebay this thing is going for about twice as much as I paid for it, and the film backs for it are about three times as much. Crazy.

One of the awesome features about MF cameras is that they're modular. The film is carried in a seperate compartment, which can be detached and exchanged with another, on the fly. This allows two things, at least:

One, you can change film to match your light conditions. Say it's the end of the day, and you need to switch from a 100 ISO film (like Fuji velvia, or Kodak Ektar, which are slide films manufactured to be shot on clear bright beautiful days) to something a little faster like a 400 ISO film (manufactured to be shot on days when the light sucks), OR, you want to shoot black and white in tandem with colour, all you need do is exchange film backs. You can't do this in 35mm. In 35mm film you either cut short a whole roll of film, or you use two cameras simultaneously, each loaded with colour and black and white film respectively, which violates one of the laws of photography: the more shit you bring to shoot, the less shit you will shoot.

Two, changing film rolls in 35mm is a hassle, and if you fuck it up you're gonna get upset, further removing you from your subject. It's not easy to fuck it up, but it's not so hard as you think. I managed to fuck up two rolls in a row, which lead to a serious degradation in my confidence, which lead to me abandoning my walk-about. It was easy to figure out what went awry, but losing two rolls of film sucks, even if it's cheap ass Fuji Superia. With MF film backs you can pre-load long before you're anywhere near a shot, and switching out backs is an easy two step process. This is highly advantageous, because loading MF film is not easy at all, and doing it out the field, with the golden light dying, and the pressure mounting must be a fucking nightmare. One I would certainly spare myself.

Once again, the decision to dedicate something to medium format film means planning out your shot, and having a very good idea of what you want. If you're just walking around cracking shots at everything that happens to look interesting, then do that shit on digital. Especially if your shot is some clever bit of ballet between people, or objects, or whatever, that will never happen again. That is the bread and butter of 35mm film and digital photography. It's no accident that photojournalists switched to 35mm from MF over 50 years ago. 35mm is a limber format that can move with moment. Should you shoot some bit of architecture, or countryside that really comes off nicely, revisit that shit with your MFC, and see what you can do.

Medium format (typically measured in cm, and shot in rolled form) and large format (typically measured in inches, and shot in single sheets the size of a notepad), is for fine art. Cleverness, and spontaneity, are traded in for nuance, hard composition, attention to detail, and vision. That's what I find so intimidating about it. Here, training, whether formal or otherwise, translates directly into avoiding despair, and rage, and all those colors from the warm end of the emotional palette. And yet, I have already taken pictures that I wish I had shot in MF or LF.

One thing I try to explain to the Japanese people I interact with is that failure is the best teacher. One thing they lack the ability to explain to me (and which I can only imperfectly glean) is that there is no room for failure in Japanese society.