Iceland Highlands with 100 Mp

Last Year in August I spent 14 days travelling around the Southern Highlands of Iceland with my Phase One 100 Megapixel camera, the (relatively) newly released Phase One XF and the IQ3-100 back.  Along with a range of Phase One, Schneider Kreuznach and Mamiya lenses it’s a very heavy camera bag!  So is it worth carrying all that gear?  Are the results really that good?  Well, yes.

I was on my way up one of the mountain trails in Landmannalaugar in the Icelandic Southern Highlands and a couple of hikers had just passed me on their way down.  The light had just begun to come out beautifully after the latest rain shower when I saw these same hikers appear on the ridge well below me headed towards a transient patch of sunlight, and I thought that would be a great opportunity for some scale in this awesome landscape.

The Technical aspects

The image above is the full width capture, (I have cropped a bit off the top and bottom) straight out of Capture One with some minor development (contrast and shadow management).  It was shot on the XF-100 with a Phase One 75-150mm f4.5 lens.  This is the Phase One version, not the considerably heavier Schneider Kreuznach version, so it’s a very good lens, but not one of the best as far as resolving power goes. But still it’s pretty impressive.  The image below is a 50% width crop of that same file.

The Full Zoom

The image below is the full 100% zoomed version of the same file, Now I’m sure you can see the hikers!  Now go back and have a look at the full image at the top of this post.  Why do I need so much resolution?  I regularly print files like this one to 3m long and occasionally to 5m long, and with 100mp of resolution they look fantastic!

Phase One XF-100 Vs the Hasselblad H6D-100

This image shot on the Phase One XF-100 with the Phase One 75-150mm f4.5 zoom lens.  So why did I sell the Hasselblad and buy the Phase One?  The 100Mp CMOS sensor was the justification for the upgrade, but Hasselblad are using the same sensor in their new H6D-100, and I deliberately waited for that to be released before making any decisions…  That’s coming up in the next post.