Nadine during the Leaf demos at EyesOnMedia

On May 24th I was demoing at the Eyes On Media shop in Amsterdam.
Eyes On Media organized a Leaf demo day where customers would get a chance to shoot with the Leaf digital backs on different cameras, the main attraction was of course the Leaf AptusII12, with it’s 80MP a very special digital back. During the day I shot several sessions with both the Leaf AptusII7 and the AptusII12 with Nadine as my model, and you readers probably already know, when Nadine is with me it’s always interesting (and this day was no exception).

Some things that were interesting
During these demo days you never know what will happen, sometimes you will demo for a group of people not asking any questions and sometimes you hardly shoot yourself because the people want to try out the cameras, so I’m always very flexible during those days. In this case it was a nice mix.

Resolution test
Of course resolution doesn’t stop with megapixels, it’s all about how much can be resolved by a system, I have to say that personally I never tested this but one of the visitors brought a very nice tool for this and we decided to test the AptusII 12, and we were not dissapointed, the resolving power of the AptusII 12 and 120MM macro was stunning, you could however very clearly see that f11 was better than f16, without a doubt due to the many megapixels. One of the customers also brought a 5DMKII and we decided to also test the 5DMKII against the Leaf system. Some people will claim that there is not much difference between the two systems, well after this test I can more than ever say that indeed the MF system wins hands down, resolving power of the 5DMKII was app 2 stops less than the AptusII 12, taking into account that the AptusII 7 is slightly better for this kind of work I know 100% sure now that my eyes doesn’t fool me and my MF setup is indeed a lot more detailed than my 5DMKII. The funny thing is that I see this every time when I do a session with both cameras but now I’ve seen it with the right targets.

Those beautiful older cameras
I have a passion for the older cameras, I’m in love with my RZ67ProII and it’s so much fun to see people bringing in old Hasselblads to see if they would work with the new Leaf digital backs, much to my surprise I saw 3 old Hasselblad systems (2 and 5 series) coming in. The most funny thing was that one of the owners very quickly found out that focusing in the studio and with a 80MP back was very critical, there were no images in focus….. I loved to try it myself and the first shot was immediately in perfect focus (as you can imagine it was also the last shot I took :D), it’s stunning to see how well the old lenses perform. With the RZ I have the same results, those lenses blow away anything I’ve seen before.

The many faces of a model
I’ve known Nadine for some time now and I’m always struck with awe about what she does with her styling and looks, and this time it was not different, she changed her looks so many times during the day that it was terrible to make the selection you see here, there were so many great shots too choose from. I’m sure that when she stops modelling she will go into styling 😀

Many thanks to
You never work alone and to make something a succes you will always need people around you, so I would like to thank the following people that helped me, help Eyes On Media to make it a great day.
Wendy Appelman and Dilani Butink for assisting me
Yair from Leaf
Rob and the team from Eyes On Media
Nadine for being my model
Anastasia for the artwork you have seen in the blog post about treating your models.

We also shot a backstage video which will be released next week.

10 replies
  1. Eero
    Eero says:

    Very nice, love the one with “bite me” nn80mp wow must be lots of detail , I can just imagine what it is like, the 3d look must be even better.nnThe most I have seen is 50mp and that blew me away. nnWonder if 80 is close to the limit for the MF sensor size?

    • Frank Doorhof
      Frank Doorhof says:

      No limit yet I guess. Although I would love to see a 33mp back with clean iso3200 and more DR instead of more mp. nnFor moire it’s nice by the way. n

    • Anto de Chav
      Anto de Chav says:

      Not even close to the limit yet.. if you count 2.7micron pixels then you get 337mp.. huge files could then be down sampled internally for better noise response at higher iso..

    • Anto de Chav
      Anto de Chav says:

      also worth mentioning that the limiting factor in the chain will be the lense’s, 120mp may be the limit for most high end medium format glass..large format glass from rodenstock or schneider will be better..

  2. Eero
    Eero says:

    I just recently read something in my on going wish for affordable MF digital. The reason the sensors are so high priced they make you pay for the MF film costs upfront instead of the old way “one roll and lab cost at a time: hehe.nBut even still out of my price range for now. Not sure if I would be happy with MF film and the needed $600 V700 scanner or the $900 V750 (fluid scanner). It most likely would be about the cost of a 24mp DSLR or a bit cheaper. but then there is the on going cost of film/lab costs.nnPS figured I’d post here in stead of the old forum.

    • Eero Makela
      Eero Makela says:

      Thank you.n===nOnly a test reply using my Facebook logon. to see if allows me to edit comments after posting.nas I can not edit the otherway I post.nOk it allows edit. I guess I need to start using another logon method so can fix all my typos

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