Medium Format Guide for Weddings and Portraiture

With medium format shedding many of its niche associations and becoming a more viable and mainstream format, now might just be the time to begin incorporating this larger format into your working repertoire. When film was still king among working photographers, medium format cameras, particularly 645, was seen as an ideal balance between image quality, weight, speed, and number of frames per roll. Once the shift to digital occurred, weight and speed became the primary differentiators in which cameras and systems were being considered for the event and portrait photographer’s bag. With the recent transition to mirrorless, medium format can now, too, tick the weight and speed boxes, along with the image quality box for which it has always been known.
In more specific terms, though, how do current medium format systems stack up for wedding, portrait, and event shooters? Surprisingly well. Considering that the mirrorless systems from Hasselblad and FUJIFILM are only a few years old, they’ve quickly acquired a feeling of maturity and include features and lenses that working portrait photographers require. In a general sense, the benefits of medium format mainly revolve around the larger sensor size and the image-quality benefits it provides. Even though most digital medium format sensors (44 x 33mm) aren’t as large as medium format film sizes (roughly 56 x 42mm and larger), they are still noticeably larger than the 24 x 36mm dimensions of a full-frame sensor. What this objectively gives you is a topic/debate for another time, but I believe there definitely is a certain “look” to medium format files; a clear separation of subject and background, and a distinct handling of colors, tones, and depth of field that provides a unique look that is especially well-suited to portraiture.