One of the first things I did with the Minolta was to bring it with me on a photo shoot I was already doing.
I didn’t know how any of the film I took would turn out, so I took some test shots at the same time I took the shots on a Canon 1.4 50mm on a Sony A7III - essentially replicating the setup with a digital camera.
And then two months later, I got a look at the results. This is a very slow way of comparing things.
First on the Sony:
Then the same photo on the Minolta:
Another shot on the Sony:
And then another on the Minolta:
Last one, results on the Sony:
And again on the Minolta:
You can draw your own conclusions on the results here, but a couple things are immediately obvious:
The Sony A7III with a converter and a 50mm lens is giving a result much closer to an 85mm lens. The lens is compressing the distance, pulling that background in much closer.
Since I often shoot with an 85mm on that same camera, I guess that means that I’m really shooting something closer to a 110-120mm lens when I do that.I’m getting warmer results with a cleaner bokeh coming out of the film camera. But since I did extensive editing to the RAW image from the Sony before exporting them, I don’t actually have a great comparison one-to-one on what kind of results I got. And I have already deleted all the raw files from the original shoot, since making this post was not something heavily on my mind at the time.
So, this did not end up being a tremendous example of benefits and disadvantages of film vs digital. But I’m glad I took the time to make the comparison. It’s a good first test.