My Transition to Full Frame Photography
When your mom rolled film into her point-and-shoot camera to take photos at your birthday, she was probably using 35mm. When Ansel Adams photographed Georgia O’Keeffe, he used 35mm.
The 35mm film size is generally the largest film size used by both professionals and hobbyists. Anything larger than 35mm begins to enter into purely professional work.
In digital photography, a lot of consumer cameras have sensors that are smaller than a 35mm piece of film. Digital camera makers did this because of cost limitations — in the early days of digital imaging, big sensors were expensive! Additionally, big sensors required lenses built for those sensors, and these lenses cost thousands of dollars.
Smaller sensors were essentially a disruptive technology. People consciously chose to sacrifice image quality to gain the convenience of the digital format. And plus, hardly anyone printed larger than 5x7" photos anyway, so who cared about pixel-level image quality? This is why digital photography eventually came to dominate, and now film is more of a specialized niche form of photography.
Only recently, camera makers began to ship full frame sensors in digital cameras at consumer prices.
In 2007, a full frame Nikon D3 cost $4999 and only had 12 megapixels (with inflation, equivalent to $5800 in today’s money).
Today (2016), a full frame Nikon D750 costs $1800 and has 24 megapixels.
In less than 10 years, we’ve doubled the resolution and reduced the price by two-thirds. It’s incredible.
Photographic technology once only available to the photographers of National Geographic, Time Magazine, and Associated Press are now available to us normal humans!
Why should we care?
Full frame means bigger pixels. Bigger pixels mean higher perceived image quality, less noise, and improved low light performance. Look at this photo from a full-frame camera:
I love this photo because it shows off the beautiful texture of the wood, the rust on the keyhole and door handle, and the shading is soft and creamy. Also notice how much detail you can see in the materials.
And then, realize that this is a 3 megapixel crop on a 24 megapixel full-frame photo!!!
If you try to do crops like this on a smaller sensor, you’ll start to lose a lot of the image quality, and you’ll see a lot more image noise.
I just ordered my Nikon D750, and I’m super excited. I’ve been shooting on a Nikon D70s since 2005, so I’m eager to jump up to a full frame DSLR. I’ve been waiting a long time for this!
With my Nikon D750 and Sony RX1, I’ll have full frame shots coming out of my point-and-shoot and my DSLR work. No more settling for cropped sensors!
