$63,000 CAMERA :: What do the images look like?

This is quite possibly the most over-the-top camera that I have ever had an opportunity to share with you guys on this show. Today we're going to be talking about the Phase One XF medium format camera with the IQ3 monochrome back. The Phase One system, if you are not familiar with it, this is a medium format digital camera and it is a modular system. So that means not only can you interchange the lenses, you can also interchange the backs. And the back that we're looking at today, the one I got to use, was the IQ3 monochrome. To my knowledge it is the only one in the country right now. It's the first one at least. There have been game-changer cameras throughout history, obviously. If you look at more of the modern era, I think you consider things like Leicas, the Nikon F, Nikon F3, when you get into digital cameras. Things like the Canon 5D series, particularly the Mark II, which introduced video. But there are cameras that come along that really redefine things. And this back, in particular, redefines it for me. Now it is a monochrome back, which means it shoots black and white. And there are other companies that make monochrome cameras, but this one is very different. And the reason it is, and we're going to get into this when we look at some images in a second, but basically the IQ3 monochrome is able to capture light beyond the visual spectrum. So if you consider the whole spectrum of light, you have ultraviolet, you have infrared, and then in the middle is what the human eye can detect. And so it's just kind of a small space in that entire spectrum of light. And this camera, because it doesn't have a Bayer filter in the way the sensor is designed, actually starts cutting into the infrared spectrum. And it's pretty amazing. It's not an infrared camera, but it does pick up a wider range of light in monochrome that we are able, sorry, wider range than what we are capable of seeing. And this allows you to start shaping that using filters and such. And I'm going to show you with the sample images. It is unbelievably amazing. Might as well get this out of the way. There's a little running joke that we have here that Apple started a couple of weeks ago. Deeper pixels. That's right. And look at the glass and the stainless. Thanks, Phil. So on a scale of one to 10 of deeper pixels, deeper pixels with maybe the iPhone, sorry, Apple being one and the phase one, where does that fall? 10. Didn't quite catch that. 10. That's more like it. I would give this a 10. Not only are the pixels deeper, but they're also actually bigger on the sensor because you have a much bigger sensor to work with. And even with 101 megapixels, there's a lot of room. The low light performance on this camera, we will get to in just a second. Keep that in mind. It's pretty much not an issue. So before we get into the physical features of the camera, I want to look at some images because that really is the important takeaway with this camera. And before we do, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor today, who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com. Squarespace is the all-in-one solution for building a beautiful website portfolio or online store. Building websites is as easy as grabbing one of their award-winning templates and customizing the whole thing in the drag and drop interface. If you can drag a folder of images onto a web browser, you can build a website. Visit Squarespace today for a free trial. And if you decide it's right for you, use offer code AOP on checkout, which will save you an additional 10%. Once again, that offer code is AOP, and I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography. Okay. So I want to share with you guys some of the image files from this camera, and I'm actually using an image editor called Capture One, which is made by Phase One. I do want to note that Lightroom will not read these files. It does not play ball. You have to use Capture One for these. Having said that though, I'm very impressed with Capture One. There's some things that you can do in here that you can't do in Lightroom, and it's pretty amazing, just the image quality and what you can do with it as an editor. Anyway, this first image, this is one that I have done some edits to, and the way this was shot is actually, this was later in the afternoon and the sun was starting to set, and it was right behind this flag. And so I really wanted to get this image where I had these dark shadows in the front, and you could see the flag kind of with this glowing quality to it. And one of the things that I love about this camera is that this sensor is able to do things that typical cameras can't, in that you retain a lot of detail in the really dark shadows and also the really bright highlights. Okay. So I'm going to zoom in here to 100% so you can kind of see the detail you're getting. One thing I'm going to note here is that even when I move this around, I mean, it's amazing at 101 megapixels, of course you would expect to have this kind of quality. But what's also interesting is that Capture One, even when I move it, it takes just a second to render the image, but it keeps up really well and it responds really quickly. And it's, it's a pretty amazing combination, this camera and Capture One. But this is an example of an image I have done some editing on, and I want to look at some images now that are straight off the camera. So this is my friend David Brook over, you might remember him from the Artist Series. David is an incredible guy, and he's also probably one of the greatest living landscape photographers today. He is really amazing. Anyway, he was in town with a couple friends, and I did a video on that last week. And you saw us in that video just shooting some portraits casually in the backyard. And we were doing them actually for this purpose of kind of showing you the difference of what's going on here. So what I want to show you is that, you know, I mentioned that this sensor is actually picking up light that is beyond the visual spectrum. And so when you start getting into infrared territory, this means things that emit infrared light are going to go to a the brighter end of things. So this means like skin tones, anything like foliage, grass, trees, so a lot of those things will start to be more bright. And so this is just straight through the camera. Now one of the things you can do if you want to dial that back is you can use an infrared cut filter. And when you apply the infrared cut filter, we go from this to this image. And you can see that the skin tones are much more tamed down. And really the trees and the grass and everything in the back kind of went a lot darker. But what's interesting is if you check out the histogram on here, everything is exposed properly. But those mid tones are what shift and it allows you to really start dialing in a specific look that you might want to get with this camera. And of course, once you start applying other filters to we're going for various yellow filters, and you can even go a little bit darker into red or something like that. And it really starts to shape that image. And it gives you a lot of flexibility. And this to me is the key with this camera. Now it does slow you down to have to dial in with filters and stuff. But if you're doing landscapes, particularly or architecture, or even portraits, I think it really becomes beneficial to what you're doing, because it allows you to really shape that tone. This is very similar to why I got so excited the first time I developed black and white film and started getting into that and realized that there's different looks you can get using different film types, different developers, different development times, and you can really start to dial in different things, just using one kind of film. And I think that this is in many ways a digital equivalent to what you're able to do in a darkroom. So the first shoot that I did with this camera, we all actually went to Weatherford, which is just outside of Fort Worth. David is doing a project right now for the gallery where he's doing a series of prints. And they're themed around really old trees that grow in the south. So he's gone through Texas, New Orleans, and traveling over towards South Carolina, and so forth. And so we found a pecan tree that literally is over 1000 years old. Up until another discovery recently, it was the oldest tree in the United States. It's just on this property. Anyway, that's what these images are. And you can see that this is where a 100 megapixel back really starts to excel is when you're doing landscapes. Now, I want to show you something. I shot this image wide open at f 2.8. And you go in here and look at the tree and the bark. And I mean, the detail on here is just like, it's outstanding. You can also start to see when your focus is off, and it becomes very frustrating sometimes to work with a camera like this, especially with a really shallow depth of field. But it does have a beautiful look to it. The lens that we used on this was the Schneider 110, I believe 2.8. And it is just absolutely gorgeous. But when you start to stop that down, by the way, this was shot with no filter at all. And it is unedited, this is straight off the camera. So there's a lot of room for processing. And if I go down here, I'll find another image, this was done at f 8. And you can see that everything gets very sharp and very detailed and focus. And it becomes kind of one of the interesting things on here is in post processing, when you're looking at essentially an image that has 15 stops of light, and what you're able to do with that in post production, typically right off the camera, things look really flat. It's kind of like if you've ever shot video using log profiles, when you're getting that many that much dynamic range in your image, it almost does require some editing at some point. And with a landscape like this, I mean, there's a lot of room to go on, but you start to get just a lot of especially when you get all this detail back in the foliage and stuff is really getting this tree to stand out. But it does give you room to go on that. And there's a lot you can do. One of the thing I want to show you, this is a shot that I set up. So using this camera is typically a little bit slow to set up. David was back here, he's got a really right stuff, panorama shooter, he was shooting a Pentax camera and doing some panoramic stitching with it. And so we set this up. So basically, we took the filter off at one point, and I got him to turn around. And then the amazing part about this that I noticed later in post is I'm going to zoom into a full 100% here on your screen. And I want you to look at the glasses around David's neck. Those are sunglasses, you can see right through them in this exposure is amazing. The other thing worth noting, too, is that David's shirt is actually black. And you'll see that I have another video that I'll do on this shoot. And you can see that in some of the supplemental footage. But it is really amazing the kind of dynamic range that you get out of this camera, just know that there is a lot of post production involved, but it's also built for that. Another thing I want to address is ISO performance, because it's pretty much not an issue at all on this camera. So this is a picture that I took of my cat in the window, this was about six in the morning, it was extremely overcast, there wasn't a lot of light. I also stopped down the camera. So I could keep everything in focus. This is shot at 12,800 ISO 12,800. Now, if you zoom in and look at the shadows, that's typically where noise starts to hide. There isn't any in here. I mean, that is a clean image. And considering that most of the cameras that I own, it really 3200 is about as high as you can push it, maybe 64. Depending on what it is, this is at 12,800, the camera will actually go up to 51,000, which is amazing, it goes a stop higher than this. But it just is mind blowing the quality that you get even at really high ISO settings like that. I'll show you the same thing on a little bit darker image. And again, this is shot very low light. So this is f4 one 100th of a second ISO is 12,800. And if I all the way in here, you can see that in these shadow areas, they're really in any noise. And there's a couple reasons why I think that this works on this camera really well. First of all, you have a much bigger sensor. So it is a medium format sensor. You're also not having to capture red, green and blue channels. So it's just capturing light. So my guess and I'm not an engineer. So somebody may correct me on this. I'm imagining that the algorithm that the camera uses to deal with noise reduction is probably a lot simpler than it would be on a color camera. The other thing is just physically the way the sensor is designed, even with 101 megapixels, it's a huge sensor. So you're able to not only have sorry about the joke deeper pixels, you're able to have much bigger pixels and the way they can be spaced on the sensor. So I mean, it's just, it's insane that I could be shooting at 12,800 ISO handheld and not have any issue at all. Another question I get asked a lot is can you use the phase one as a street photography camera? And I'm not really sure why you would want to do that because it is massively heavy, but I did try it anyway and it works just fine. I mean, the autofocus works great. Had it set up for back button focus and did a bunch of shooting just around Fort Worth and it came out really cool. The other thing I want to show you is this shot I was shooting in manual mode. You don't have to, you can use aperture priority or shutter priority, but I was shooting manual on these because I really wanted to get a feel for what the sensor would be able to do. And this one was overexposed. Obviously I want to show you what you can recover on this. So you can see even in the histogram, I have clearly blown the whites clear over, but if I just lower the exposure on this and I'm not even dealing with just lowering highlights or using a curse channel or anything, you can see that you get a lot of it back. So the amount of data that the sensor is capable of capturing is just incredible that I'm not saying you would want to go out and not pay attention to your exposure, but it's very forgiving in just this insane way. Another thing that is very cool is I saw this guy come and this is an old dairy factory that we were shooting in front of. So I kind of set up, I was ready for him when he came by, there was no tripod involved with this. This was all handheld. One of the really cool things that Capture One has is this keystoning feature and Lightroom has similar lens adjustments, but this is kind of your instant eight by 10. And there are basically three modes that you can choose in here. You can do keystone vertical, you can do a horizontal, or you can do a combination thereof. And this one is a combination. Basically it's hard to see on here, but if you look at these little circle points, it's going to give you a square. And basically you look for lines to line that up and you apply it. And you can see that this was rotated a little bit and centered in, but you have 101 megapixels to deal with on here. So it's, it's pretty amazing. So, you know, if you're not using a tripod, it can be forgiving just as much as I think exposure can on the sensor. This camera is really just like so amazingly impressive. It's unbelievable. I wanted the bulk of this review to be centered around looking at images and seeing what this camera can do, because that is what separates it from anything else on the market that's available. It really is a special image. And I wanted to look at a lot of those to show you what is involved with that. Now the camera is no slouch either. Now, most of the image quality we've been talking about here is the back. It's the IQ3 monochrome. You could easily swap that out for a color back if you wanted to. Those are interchangeable, but this is centered around the XF system and the XF camera is amazing. It is probably the most elegantly designed user interface I have ever used on any camera. It's like using an iPhone, not a camera. And most of you know, that are familiar with like Sony's menus or even Nikon and Canon, they get very complex. They get very deep. They're non-intuitive. Everything on here is just a tap away or swipe away. And the way it works is basically you have your, your main menu functions and you tap on any of these to change what that is. So this could be, you know, your priority mode. This could be the metering mode. This could be auto focus. And then you can swipe to go through the extra modes, which include things like an HDR mode. There's a time-lapse mode. You can do focus stacking. There's also a pro photo mode, which is very cool because this enables you to actually radio control the pro photo system lights from the camera itself. Also very cool is there is a seismograph built into the camera. Now this is one of the drive modes and what this does is it senses any motion. So if you're shooting landscapes and windy conditions or something that's not stable, it will actually wait until there's no movement in the camera before it makes the image, which is very cool. And you also get a digital bubble level. Everything is very accessible and extremely well thought out on the physical design of the camera as well. All the dials, the back button focus, everything is easy to access. And what I kind of felt like using this camera is that it's just an extension of you as a photographer. And that's what a camera should be. It is a tool to get the job done. I never once felt like I was fighting with the camera to find something or to scroll through a menu to get to something. And a lot of that is just very typical of just beautiful Scandinavian design. We were kind of joking around calling it the Ikea of cameras because there really isn't another interface like this out there. Now the interface we've been looking at is on the top of the camera, and that's mainly the camera functions itself for the XF series. There is a screen on the back of the IQ3 as well, of all their backs do, and it controls mainly the functions related to the sensor. So this is going to be everything from image playback to live view and so on and so forth. And just like the touchscreen on the top of the camera, there's a touchscreen here and it's more responsive and intuitive than anything I've ever used. And it's just like working on an iPhone. The live view is exceptional and I used it quite a bit as a focus aid. And what's really cool is you just basically when you're in live view, you can tap and scroll in and not only is the quality image good, but it maintains an incredible resolution while you're zooming in and is very useful as a focus aid. The image review layout is extremely useful as well. It has everything from histograms to warning overlays to under and overexposure, light level, temperature map even, that enable you to like really be super critical if you're making images, especially in the field. Now a lot of times a camera like this, if you're using it in the studio, you may be tethered to a computer so you can actually see your images and analyze them there. But what I really like about that touchscreen on the back is it does enable you to have a lot of control and a lot of access to things if you don't have a setup like that and you're shooting in the field. So a few thoughts and observations about Phase One. First of all, they are not a consumer camera company and I am not their target audience and most people watching this are really not either. They deal with cultural institutions like art museums or historical societies that need to get extremely high resolution images for documentation purposes. That's probably their biggest customer base. Second to that is probably architecture photographers and then you have high-end fashion and people who are making enough money to support it and some fine art photographers. Now that's why the pricing is high and that's why what they're doing is very cutting edge. We're really not their target audience. Having said that though, companies like Phase One represent the cutting edge of imaging technology and so this is typically stuff that in the next couple years you'll start to see trickle down onto the consumer level. And I do have to admit, part of me wishes that I didn't have the chance to play with one of these because you immediately start thinking about how you can possibly finance something to the tune of $50,000, $65,000 as a camera setup, which is completely impractical. But the other cool thing is Digital Transitions, the company that were nice enough to loan this camera to us to look at, they also rent them. So if it's something high-end that you need just for a day or two for a specific shoot, that is a possibility. So check out Digital Transitions because renting one of these is really not that bad of an option. And speaking of, I want to give a shout out and thanks to Digital Transitions again. They did not pay me to do this video. They simply loaned me an extremely expensive camera to play with for a few days because Rod and I asked and that was really nice and gracious of them to do. So for those of you who are sponsors, I've got some downloads for you and if you don't know what I'm talking about, I will explain in just a second. But if you're sponsoring this channel, if you go over to the Community tab, you will see downloads to not only a gallery of images that I showed you today. You can download these at full resolution. They're JPEGs. But I also have put a raw file available for download. Please note that Lightroom will not read this file. It's about 131 megabyte file, but you'll need a copy of Capture One to read it. And they have a 30-day free trial for Capture One. So if you need to download that to try it. In fact, you should check out Capture One because it's pretty amazing software. If you don't know what I'm talking about with this whole sponsor business, if you look below this video next to the Subscribe button, you're going to see another button that says Sponsor on it. And this gives people the opportunity to sponsor the channel and you can get some additional downloads and content when I do them. It's really, there's no videos behind a paywall. I know there's been some confusion on that. It's still the regular channel. It just enables me to make great content for you guys and you get access to extra things. So when I review cameras and stuff, I will let you download raw files and such. So anyway, it's kind of a cool way that you can help me help you if you know what I mean. So I really do think this is one of those groundbreaking cameras that comes along and completely changes the game. And I would like to get your impressions as well. So please leave me a comment below. I've got some more videos coming up. We've got photo assignments on Monday, so be ready for that. And then I also have some follow-up videos. I've got another one where we're actually taking this camera out in the field and shooting with it. And we're doing some landscape work and things like that. So you can kind of get some more phase one if you want. And then also I have some stuff coming up on Rod's filter set. And so it's going to be a lot of videos this month and I'm really excited. Until the next one, I will see you guys then. Later.