Medium Format Shooting

Photo by Vivian Maier

When it comes to street photography one of the great challenges is to shoot medium format. Essentially medium format is any camera that shoots film or a digital image that’s larger than 35 mm and less than 4″ X 5″ or certainly 8 X 10″.

So what’s so desirable about medium format?

It’s great redeeming quality aside from being a lot of fun is it slows the photographer down.

What I mean by that is any smaller format camera is a lot easier and faster to use than a medium format film camera which often comes with no light meter or at least no light meter that is working. Not only that unlike the sleek modern digital mirrorless cameras that fit in your hands a medium format camera is more than a handful and a whole lot less graceful to handle.

With medium format cameras you’ve got to be carrying an external light meter and be using it constantly as the amount of available light continuously changes all day long and from location to location.

Second issue is there is no auto focus. This is not a camera where you touch the shutter button and the lens auto focuses and the camera automatically sets the exposure. No here you rack the focus in and out as you look at the viewing screen.

Even older 35 mm film cameras work faster and easier than a 2 1/4″ format medium format camera.

And while the lack of modern features like these slows you down it’s the way you compose your image through most medium format cameras that really makes a difference.

The best example of this are the twin-lens cameras like the Rolleicord. That’s a Rolleicord being used in the photo above by the amazing Vivian Maier* herself. Twin-lens cameras like the Rolleicord force the photographer to look down onto a fresnel screen to compose their image.

This looking down mean the photo is now going to be taken from waist height instead of eye height. This lowering the camera often makes for a more dynamic look to the image especially when it comes to street photography. It also hides the fact from the unsuspecting subject that the photographer is actually shooting them.

Another big advantage of the format itself is the extra information contained by the 2 1/4 inch negative which with a proper flat scanner can be moved into the digital darkroom on your computer for editing and printing or publishing.

For more about Vivian Maier*, a nanny working and shooting in Chicago and New York and whose photographic artwork was undiscovered until 2007, two years before her death, when out of money she stopped paying for a rental unit and her 150,000 negatives and prints were discovered by the purchaser of the unit see this video link and this one by the Smithsonian Institute.