….where my mouth is.

I have written quite a bit about the imminent demise of film in these columns. Now is the time of reckoning, where I make the move from my point-and-shoot-one-second-shutter-lag-digital to the real thing. My drivers are medium format quality without the bulk, full frame digital sensor, no shutter lag and the convenience of not having to process and scan film, in that order.

Let’s face it, if you want a full frame 35mm digital camera your choices are not great. Until a while back there were two from Kodak and one from Canon, all very expensive. Kodak, being the second worst run American company, just discontinued theirs, of course. That leaves only Canon, with a $7,000 very costly and very bulky offering. I cannot remember the model designation but it’s something like ‘2006 Model 15B we-just-upgraded-it-twice-this-month mega-digital something or other’.

Then, late last year, Canon capitalized on its lead with larger light sensors and released the EOS 5D for some $3,000. Now it may well be free with any purchase of two boxes of Corn Flakes two years hence, given the rate of depreciation of these digital wonders, but Canon’s exclusive offering makes it look positively cheap compared with the professional model. The smart people at the company priced it right – expensive enough that you can console yourself that it is a ‘professional’ camera, whatever that means, but cheap enough to attract a host of keen amateurs. Like me.

So I waited a while to let the initial bugs get sorted out, meanwhile pondering whether the sale of my medium format equipment should proceed immediately, given that film is unlikely to be available in this format for much longer. The value of this gear is important to me as I propose to make this whole change a zero cost affair. Enough with net equipment spending!

Now I’m a photographer and an American. That says when I list things on eBay I support the listings with the very best pictures, knowing that a good picture really is worth a thousand dollars. Forget words. Not American. So I spend the best part of a day with the Novatron studio flash, umbrellas, backdrops, you name it, and take revealing, detailed pictures of my wares. All on my little Olympus 5mp digital, the one with the one second shutter lag. All of this culminates in no fewer than eighteen listings on Fraud Central, excuse me eBay, the ultimate destination for sellers. Only America could conceive of a multi-billion dollar business where you can lie about your wares and be pretty much assured of free passage. Why so many auctions? Because history proves that you make more from breaking up sales into small parts. The ‘outfit for sale’ thing reduces your market and selling price.

Well, pretty much everything sold for top dollar and the household is now replete with packing boxes containing fine Rollei and Mamiya medium format equipment. It’s good to know that these superb tools are going to good homes and that UPS will make some money. I have $6,000 in the bank and B&H Photo Video in New York has a $6,000 order. And yes, that’s another $435 in sales taxes not paid to the thieves in Sacramento.

The first claim on these funds is my wife’s. I have long known that if you are to buy yourself a toy, budget 100% more than you plan to spend. That’s the cost of a face-saving gift for the wife and keeps things humming along smoothly on the marital front. And in case you still think this is money poorly spent, just take one look at the object of my affections and you will know otherwise:

The next time you will be reading this I should have the camera in my hands and a few shots to show for it.

So why the insistence on full frame and why not a Leica? First, I like my wide angle lenses to be wide angle. A 21mm which becomes a 35mm on any one of a number of digital SLRs out there is senseless. Secondly, I like differential focus. That 90mm on full frame is 55mm on crippled frame. Suddenly your portrait lens has added one stop’s worth depth of field. After over 40 years with 35mm, I know how the depth of field feels with all my lenses. I do not propose to relearn that. So that ends the full frame vs. crippled frame debate. Finally, I want medium format quality and basic physics tells me that’s easier to do with a large original (or sensor) than with a small one.

And what happened to waiting for Leica? Nothing would make me happier than simply moving all my superb Leica glass from the M2 and M3 rangefinders to a digital M. Well, I concluded a while back that the lack of entrepreneurial vision and capital at Leica means we will not see a digital M for many years and even then you would be paying $6,000+ for a crippled frame sensor. Sure, the excuses everyone makes against full frame sensors with wide angle lenses that place the rear element too close to the ‘film’ are well known. We are told by these Luddites that the light rays strike the sensor at too acute an angle, causing definition problems. The solution is simple, but it takes some genius at Canon to implement it. Cameras can electronically sense focal length – that’s why you can see the exact focal length at which you took a picture displayed in the EXIF metadata stored with your digital snap. So when the focal length gets short, have a small vacuum device bow the sensor backwards, thus flexing the edges to a perpendicular angle to incoming peripheral light rays. Hard you say? Is not Canon the company that gave us lens gyroscopes (Image Stabilization), eye controlled focus (the camera focuses where your eyeball is pointed), full frame sensors, lenses with diffraction gratings to cut bulk, and on and on? And vacuum backs intended to keep the film flat are as old as the earth. Well, what’s called for here is a vacuum back that distorts the film. And let me tell you, there is no way on earth that Leica has the capital or the distribution to develop and market that.

Now I’m not about to sell all my Leica gear. First, it is not dependent on the continued existence of film to retain its value, unlike all that medium format gear I just sold. There are any number of Leica equipment fetishists out there, many in a newly recovering Japanese economy, that value retention is simply not an issue. Second, I still enjoy using the M rangefinders and can see that continuing for a while at least. Third, maybe Voigtlander/Cosina will come out with a full frame version of their Epson RD-1. In which case the Leica bodies will move on to pay for the new digital body and those phenomenal lenses will get another lease on life. So it’s premature to sell this gear.

In the meanwhile, with the goal of learning a complex piece of new equipment and making it work for me, I have loaned my M2 and 35mm Aspherical Summicron to a friend for a year. That should focus the mind wonderfully. Mine and hers! And yes, I still have the M3 if I need a quick fix.