Ausreenact
I was invited to Lithgow to document a bunch of lovely world war II reenacters, Ausreenact. This was not my first time hanging with this crew, last time being sometime before Covid, 2019 I think.
Whenever I get presented a chance like this, a creative shoot, I try to do something that is new to me, so this time I decided to take the medium format Pentax 645D as well as the Fuji XH2S with the IBELUX 40/.85 and compare the results (once the images were roughly steered towards the same rendering intent. I wanted to see how well the little APS-C with its very fast lens could achieve a ‘medium format look’, after all 40mm f0.85 is pretty shallow, approximately equivalent to a 60mm f1.2 on full frame.
I also took the opportunity to try some ProRes 422 video footage, but really all of the video stuff is still very very new to me and I don’t feel like I know nearly enough yet to be going into projects with certainty with my own competence. I am a self teaching kinda person, I learn from doing and doing wrong.
Anyway, I shan’t disclose which images were taken with which camera, lets just see what people think of the end results (that’s what really matters). With the help of Cobalt Images I steered both formats to using Fujifilm’s Eterna Bleach Bypass sim as a base with my own further tweaking to arrive at a rendering I decided worked reasonably well. The formal portraits at the end are particularly interesting as each mug shot consists of a medium format and APS-C version, time to guess!
What I can tell you is that 29 images of the 65 here were taken with the Fuji XH2S, either using the IBELUX 40/.85 or XF23/2. 17 images of the 65 were taken with the 645 DFA55/2.8 and the remaining 19 images a combination of either the 645 75/2.8LS or A35/3.5 with again the Pentax. So basically a pretty good even mix between medium format shots and APS-C.
As always, thanks for looking.
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