What camera should I buy?
Are you a student? If you are, and you know the basics skip 35mm and go straight to photography. The reason is, you’ll need to be finishing you course using medium format or large format so there’s every reason to get used to it straight away and be confident enough to use large format in you second and final years.
When I was at school I progressed naturally through experimenting with all sorts. This meant I ended up spending enormous amounts of money too.
If I could equip you, I would give you one of the following:
Mamiya 7II, Mamiya RZ67 and, but not just, a half decent DSLR (digital SLR).
Cost: £1000 -£2000 ish. For the DSR spend around £500-600. If you think that’s expensive, you are right! But you’ve just paint £3000 in tuition fees anyway. Think of it like this: buying two cameras that are half the price but are not as good and then buying a better one at a later date, now you are bankrupt and cant even buy film for the bloody thing.
The bottom line of my advice here is, for best quality use a large negative. In order to match the quality of the large negatives in digital you need to spend a fortune on a camera. More on that another day.
The numbers at the end of the camera models above refer to the size of the negative: 6cm x 7cm. For medium format photography, this is the optimum.
For example, walk into a photo shop with 6×9 negs and you are likely to pay extra. 6×7 is large and to get bigger you should move on to the very different and expensive world of large format. More on neg formats another time, plenty to say, plenty ways to get complicated.
Thus, to conclude, a medium format camera of 6×7 format will set you up for years of timeless (until they ban it, like they ban everything) photography. Its easy, it college-future-proof, its brilliant, top notch quality and nobody can fault it. You can now go out and think about the images rather than the bloody camera.
Thanks for reading,
Dan Larsson.
