Darren Bradley
Well-Known Member
The above photo is of an ALPA Max technical camera with a Schneider lens and a Phase One P45 Digital Back that I had a chance to play with while in Palm Springs a couple of weeks ago.
The advantage of this system over the standard DSLR set-up for architecture (the Canon 5DMkII with TS-E lenses, for example), is that it allows completely independent shift movements on the X and Y axes, and rather than moving the lens, you move the sensor. This prevents stereoscopic effects when trying to stitch together several photos. Also, PhaseOne's CCD sensor has superior dynamic range to the typical CMOS sensor you'd find in a DSLR. It also has superior resolution, of course.
The downside is that, well, that superior resolution also means with all of those pixels you have ginormous files to contend with. Also, the system is cumbersome and not very easy to carry around or use on the fly - you have to shoot tethered to a laptop, for the most part, so you can see what you're shooting. That takes a lot of the spontaneity or candid elements that I strive for completely out of the equation. And because the lens sits so close to the sensor, light hits it at an angle at the edges of the frame, causing a fair amount of vignetting and strange color effects (called "lens cast"), and which needs to be corrected via software (there's an ability to do that in CaptureOne software), provided you take lens cast correction shots with every photo (this means holding a piece of translucent perspex over the lens when taking shots at various shift degrees. The result is that you end up with white shots that show coloring and vignetting, which you then enter into the CaptureOne software for each of your actual shots so that it can map and auto-correct the effects). Add to all that the fact that customer service at PhaseOne is almost nil - the needs of technical camera users are NOT a high priority at PhaseOne and so they have been slow to acknowledge any issues and even slower to provide fixes for them, despite years of begging - so I've been told.
This photo was taken with my iPhone, by the way.
