LUMIX and The art of Full-Frame
LUMIX and The art of Full-Frame
by Anthony Rock for ©Panasonic Lumix
It all began with our desire to share our experiences and stories with others. To share the human experience has never lost its importance to us. If history has taught us one great lesson, it is that clarity and being understood has only become more important. From painting on great cave walls to the chiselling and carving of faces in stone and wood, we as humans have always struggled to capture and share what we see and feel in ways that best represent the feeling and nuances of any particular moment.
The beginning
In my opinion, it was in 1868 that Louis Ducos du Hauron managed to make colour photography a reality through the chemical process of decomposition in red, yellow and blue. He superimposed three positives to obtain the final composition. To print, he used the subtractive assembly method that he developed. At this point, photography or even the idea of it was still pretty much an inaccessible and very time consuming to practice. Until the 1990s, photography and photographic equipment would evolve with such a rapid pace, as many bright minds and creative souls developed new and wonderful ways to produce images.
Traditional mechanical film cameras continued in popularity with professionals and enthusiasts alike. The most popular format had become 35mm. This was because it had been the most portable and versatile format. This was why both the Rangefinder and SLR form factors were both adopted and adapted to carry the most popular digital options up until this very day.
In 1972, British Physicist and inventor Dr. Michael Tompsett produced the first pixel CCD colour image. He had designed and built the first ever video camera with a solid state sensor (CCD). The image that he produced of his wife made it to the cover of Electronics Magazine. It was actually 1975 when Steven Sasson (an electrical engineer) successfully explored the idea of making use of CCD (charged-coupled device), computing parts and a film camera resulted in the creation of the first digital camera. It was a genius mass concoction that weighed more than 3.6 kg and recorded to tape! Even then, it was only 100 × 100 resolution (0.01 megapixels). As the new technology was to be an immediate threat to traditional film sales and production companies, no action was made to create or release a consumer digital camera. It was not until the 1990’s that the introduction of digital cameras would begin to truly change the face of photography forever.
Vision
Regardless of if you are a fine art-portrait, fashion, landscape, journalist or wedding photographer, clarity of message has always been paramount. The ability of a photographer to accurately express their vision has always been a fine balance of ability and affordability. The tools which had enabled the highest final image quality had been for a long time prohibitively expensive. The use of 35mm cameras and film scanning was relatively inexpensive in comparison to early pro-digital cameras with their relatively low final image quality.
Natural expectations
As a fine artist photographer, you will be interested in capturing the balance of fine detail and texture. You will want depth. You will want the light and the richness of colour that you painstakingly set up for your composition. You want others to see exactly what you see in your mind with no compromise whether it be the detail of skin, clothes or in the eyes of the model.
As a fashion photographer, you will expect to be able to capture the best possible representation of your client's clothes and accessories with a dynamic range to not lose detail in the darkest darks of cloth to the brightest highlights on shiny accessories on either the catwalks or in your studio.
As a landscape photographer, you may want to capture the most beautiful images of the most beautiful or interesting spaces and places in the world. Sometimes this may be the microscopic detail in a cityscape or the vast and unending expanses of mountains and the sky. Landscape photography by definition in itself is much more about conveying your intent in an image than simply taking a photograph. The task in itself of conveying through your final image, the feeling you had when immersed and perched with your camera is almost a feet of magic as it is a skill in itself.
As journalists and wedding photographers, you have no time or possibility to recapture the fleeting moments and interactions that tell a story just that once. Your images will be the only proof for centuries to come of these moments of love, pain or political change.
As filmmakers, you have so much to deal with already without having to worry about the functionality and limitations of your tools.
Progression
There have been many breakthroughs and technological advances made to sensors and software development in sub-full-frame cameras. You may have been happy with the tools you had at your disposal. Perhaps you were squeezing every bit of performance and detail from them, but they have always seemed to leave you with having to make some kind of compromise. It may be that you have been satisfied with the quality of the images. The quality of the lightweight and high megapixel crop sensor cameras have been a great value. You are skilled enough to make great images however, you are finding that taking a closer look at your pictures you are left wanting more. It may be that you are noticing the fine difference in bokeh quality, noise levels and different ISO’s or that you want more out of your wide angle lenses. It could also be that you had to put up with poor low light sensitivity or a dynamic range that left you with choosing between a well-exposed foreground, sky and hi-lights that lacked detail.
Flexibility
Making the choice to move to full-frame will help you increase the quality of your expression. Although cropped format sensors offer great cost and weight value, smaller formats with high pixel counts do reach a point of diminishing returns. Full-frame sensors have a huge advantage of ultimate flexibility. The class-leading pixel density on our full-frame sensors is always ready to capture the most light possible. With a high-quality aspherical lens per pixel gathering the maximum amount of light, you are able to creatively crop without compromise or loss of image quality. You will also gain a greater ISO range and performance moving to a full-frame camera.
Revolutionary tools
We have been working on revolutionary tools to help you realise your vision. Whether you are capturing images bound for the gallery cinema, we have the solution for you. We bring you a camera with the ultimate resolution and professional performance. Introducing the LUMIX S series. Capture clean, stunning images with ISO sensitivity choice between 50 and 51200! We bring you 60P 4K video recording which is a world first in a full-frame camera, enabling even more quality at your fingertips for your film making. SD and XQD options for the best file storage support. The LUMIX S1R and S1 are rugged, highly dust and splash resistant with a robust triaxial tilting 2,100k dot LCD will help you to compose on the fly!
LUMIX S1 and LUMIX S1R have a fantastic new L-mount for S series lenses plus Leica and Sigma options as well. This is an incredible ecosystem of the finest glass ready for you to create with.
Newly-developed 35 mm full-frame image sensor (approx. 47M for the S1R and 24M for the S1)
World's first*¹ support for 4K 60p/50p video recording in a full-frame Digital Single Lens Mirrorless camera
World's first*¹ full-frame camera equipped with Dual I.S. (Image Stabilization) plus take advantage of multi-shot High-Resolution mode
Double slot for XQD memory cards and SD memory cards
Rugged Triaxial tilt, 3.2-inch (8.0cm), 3:2 aspect LCD with static touch control with %100 field of view!
OLED Live View Finder with 5,760k dots, eye sensor with a 0.005sec, 120fps display speed
Author Anthony Rock for ©Panasonic Lumix