Taking Pictures the Hard Way

(For those interested: Nikon D850, Micro 105mm f/2.8 VR II, three SB-R200 heads on a forward ring with a wireless controller on the shoe. I usually shoot at 1/250. f/11, and "L1.0" ie ISO 50 equiv, with the flash set to make up exposure. It's a fairly complex rig, but very simple to use, to the point where I don't worry much about whether I'll get keepers when shooting wild wasps unless I'm right up at 1:1 and a 6" working distance.)

Right there with you on film versus digital. I get the nostalgia and I do still have Grandpa's Nikkormat FTn that I learned on as a kid, but I did shoot film as a kid and I'm not sorry to have moved to digital, not least because I'm certain I could not do the kind of work I do - chasing wild wasps around or finding places where they congregate, and shooting them as they go about their occasions undisturbed by me - without digital.

So far as I can tell, there aren't that many photographers out there who do that kind of work at all, and I refuse for both ethical and competitive reasons to join the ranks of those insect macro shooters who capture and kill their subjects - they certainly do produce beautiful images, but I don't respect the means by which they do so. Sure, I can't stack focus to get shots sharp all the way through, but so what? When you look at my work, you can do so in the knowledge that the trajectory of life out of which you're seeing that 4ms slice was in no way deflected by my efforts in documenting part of it - and I also have the satisfaction of knowing the same, as well as that I'm doing a kind of work that is in a lot of ways harder than theirs. Sure, you can screw up a stack and have to reshoot, but when your subject will never move again because you've killed it, all that costs you is time. Meanwhile, my dilettante ass is over here trying to capture moments that have never existed before and never will again, and sure, I don't always get them, but I do get them. [1]

I think that's worth more than all the perfect focus stacking in the world ever will be, and on film I can't imagine being able to work that way at all, because those wasps aren't waiting around for me and I wouldn't want them to. (Well, aside from the one time they got so used to seeing me by a caterpillar nest that they started using me as a waypoint on their route to it! That was oddly sweet to realize, but it was their choice, not mine, and I suppose that's the point.)

[1] https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC1220.jpg

I did get an Epson V600 to do photo scanning, do you have any detail on why it would not produce good scans? I tested it with a few old 35mm negatives and it looked quite alright after disabling _all_ the postprocessing crap in the official software and loading it into darktable to do the negative processing.

Also thanks for the pointers on the medium format cameras. I guess I'll keep eying ebay for those cameras a bit longer.

You’re both correct—optics are constrained by sensor size, so while the amount of background defocus is determined directly by optics, it is determined indirectly by sensor size.

The amount of blur at infinity is proportional to the ratio of the aperture size (e.g. measured in mm) to the subject size (e.g. measured in mm). For a given lens design, the aperture size is proportional to the sensor size.

You do get higher aperture numbers for smaller sensors but we’re talking about a factor of, say, 2x weighed against much larger numbers. This is just because wide-open lenses are impractical to manufacture at larger sizes (weight goes up with the cube, after all).

I see phone cameras with lenses at like ƒ/2.2 or something thereabouts and it’s not radically different from what you’d see on larger cameras until you get to LF, but if you dive into vintage LF lenses you’ll see “barrel lenses” with crazy, like, ƒ/2 designs for shooting on LF film. These are not scaled-up versions of sensible, modern designs. Instead, they are really old designs, and they are not gonna be sharp.