Great picture Mark. If I remember right, the first picture I saw of your granddaughter she was riding a horse and was all of 4 or 5 yrs old.

So....the more I get into this, the more and more I am appreciating modern digital FF photography and what we have available to us. It is impressive as I kept entering the values for MF or LF lenses the calculator would come up with values of lenses where we have FF options. It really had to be a 4x5 LF lens faster than f/4.5 or 645 lens faster than f/1.8 before you drop below f/1.2 FF equivalence.

That said, I am curious, so I am about to head out and I am going to buy the Mamiya 645 with the 80 f/1.9 lens (~50 f/1.2 equivalent). I'll get a couple rolls of film and compare against my R5 with Sigma 50A.

We'll see where that goes. Beyond the question of if there is something to film, such as handling highlights/overexposures better, etc, Large format does offer many lenses that are equivalent to f/1.5 (f/5.6) and the ability to do tilt/shift with them all with the right LF camera. There are a few LF lenses out there that get below f/1 FF equivalent, but they are certainly not common.

My main project this winter is digitizing old family photos, so I need to get back to that.

A few links I found yesterday: