Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a vari-angle LCD screen. While that’s not exactly groundbreaking, the illustrations in the patent appears to show some kind of medium format digital camera. What’s more, it looks nearly identical to the Samsung digital medium format prototypes that emerged earlier this year.
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In this social media age, companies are constantly dreaming up all kinds of random ideas for demonstrating the benefits of their products, and hoping that the videos will go viral (an example would be this bulletproof glass CEO that literally stood behind his product). A couple of years ago, Phase One wanted to demonstrate the durability of its digital backs for medium format cameras, so they came up with the “African Elephant Durability Test.” The test proved conclusively that if you’re going into environments where elephants might be looking to stomp on your camera, don’t bring along your $14,000+ Hasselblad back — bring a Phase One back instead!
Camera review sites should start subjecting the latest DSLRs to this test. It’d certainly be an interesting addition to camera reviews.
(via Fstoppers)
Remember the strange boxy cameras that were spotted on Samsung’s website a couple months ago? Turns out they were in fact digital medium format cameras, but were developed for “internal purposes” only. In an interview with Megapixel, a Samsung Regional product manager states,
We have the technology to develop a medium format cameras but we are not going to do that because this is not our market. Samsung is a manufacturer that focuses on a broad market – we are not a niche manufacturer like Hasselbald or Lieca [sic]. What you see in the image was developed for internal purposes in order to look into future technologies. At this point we have no plans to release it to the public. We have done similar things with lenses – for example we developed a 1000mm lens for astronomical use – but again just for internal purposes.
Hopefully they change their mind — an affordable medium-format camera geared towards enthusiasts would be awesome.
Australian PhD student Hamish Innes-Brown lurked around Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and shot these beautiful photographs of airplanes landing using a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera and Kodak Portra 160NC medium format film.
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Sigma’s upcoming SD1 uses a special Foveon sensor that captures red, green, and blue information at each pixel by stacking three separate 15MP sensors, giving the resulting images 46 million pieces of information. Hasselblad’s new H4D-200MS medium format DSLR also captures each of the three colors at every pixel, but with a different method — it shoots 6 separate photos with its 50MP sensor, but shifts the sensor by 1.5 pixels for each shot, giving the resulting photos 200MP of resolution.
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With the recent craze on mimicking retro photography through phone apps, it’s only natural that someone would take it a step further and design a retro way to shoot with the phone as well, right? The Slow Photography camera concept by photographer David McCourt is a medium format-style box that lets you use your phone as a digital back.
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Check out this bizarre looking homemade medium format camera spotted by tokyo camera style on the streets of Tokyo, Japan. That bizarre glass bulb you see sticking out of it is the 360 degree lens that projects panoramic views onto the 120 film inside the camera.
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Designer Kelly Angood created this cardboard pinhole camera that looks exactly like a Hasselblad medium format camera. The design is screen printed onto the cardboard, and the camera accepts 120 film. See sample photographs shot with this camera over on Angood’s website.
Pinhole Hasselblad (via Make)
Update: Angood published a PDF with templates and instructions for those of you who want to make your own.
How do photographers get those wide images that bleed through the edges of the negative, showing the sprocket holes? It’s a technique that allows your to create stunning panoramic images — these little bits of film become art in themselves. These photographs are achieved by loading 35mm film into a 120 medium format camera. This tutorial was written with the Holga in mind, but the same technique works for other 120 cameras as well.
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For those of you who still shoot film and are adventurous, have you tried double film photography? Flickr user Chuck Miller stuck two 35mm Fuji 200 films — one normal, one redscale — into a Holga 120N and shot the films simultaneously to get these unique sprocket hole, layered photographs.
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