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THE EQUIPMENT
No, I have not gone digital. I still use a medium format film camera, which uses a 2¼"x1½" negative (three times the area of a 35mm camera negative). To put it in terms of digital SLR, the only camera that compares to my Pentax 645 in quality of output is the Mamiya ZD 22 megapixel, which is still prohibitively expensive and out of reach for many photographers.
For my purposes, I need to be able to enlarge my images up to 30"x40", a size which my customers routinely order. Not even with one of the new professional 16 megapixel cameras would I be able to enlarge to that size. The picture would be too pixelated.
Are there other reasons to stick to film? Absolutely. Film is organic. It captures a given subject in a more true-to-life way. Digital images are made to "pop" through all sorts of inorganic manipulations. So a photo enlarged from film will always seem more real and less "cartoony" than digital. Some people prefer digital, but I prefer analog.
The high-end digital SLR cameras offer very good image quality and unparalleled ease of use. They are also much cheaper to operate than their predacessors, and if I could justify the initial cash outlay for new equipment, I would switch. But for now I'm not willing to give up even a little bit of "realness" in my pictures as a tradeoff for convenience.
In the interest of saving Internet server space and cutting down on download time, all of the images on this site have been shrunk and color-corrected, so they will appear more cartoony than actual prints, which are still enlarged optically onto Kodak Royal Paper.
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