Shooting Through Mist with the Phase One P45

(click on images for larger versions)

If there is one thing that should make a photographer jump out of bed in the morning it is seeing mist or fog when they look out of the bedroom window! Today was the first really misty day of the year here in the suburbs of London so a great opportunity to take some shots while on a walk with my dog.

As well as making a scene more atmospheric and magical, mist helps to create subject separation in a way that is similar but not quite the same as how shallow depth of field isolates a subject.

On a clear day, if you point your camera at the dense vegetation of a wood then all you are going to capture is a very busy and confusing mass of tree trunks and branches. But on a misty day, you can easily isolate foreground trees from the background, creating points of interest and a feeling of depth to your images.

I decided to convert to monochrome quite a few of the images I shot today. Mist naturally subdues colours and emphasizes shapes so taking those images one step further to being fully monochrome can make a lot of sense.

For all these shots I chose to use a Phase One P45+ digital back attached to a Mamiya 645 AFD camera. This is a camera and digital back combination that I used to own and shoot with many years ago when medium format digital was very much the tool of the trade for professional photographers.

These days, smaller format digital cameras are the mainstream for professionals, technology advancement means that small sensors have more than enough resolution and adequate dynamic range for pretty much any task. Medium format digital is more than ever now a high end niche market that very few photographers can afford. Fujifilm are trying to buck that trend with their GFX mirrorless range, only time will tell how successful they will be.

Back to the Phase One P45+, it is a 37mm x 49mm CCD digital sensor with 39.45M pixels. A 39MP image can easily be enlarged to a 30″ wide print or even wider if you want to. The raw files are 16bit and give 12 stops of dynamic range. The “+” in P45+ indicates an improved version of the original P45 digital back, one of the main improvements being the ability to shoot very long exposures when needed. The P45+ was released in 2007.