Andy Haslam is a leading architectural photographer based in the north west of England. He has been shooting with Leaf digital backs for a number of years and chose to use the Cambo Wide RS with the Leaf Aptus-II 12 for his latest shoot.

The client, Terry Farrell & Partners is one of the most prestigious architectural company’s. Sir Terry required a record of the lower ground design offices and also his residence above this working space.

For the shoot Andy used the Cambo Wide RS, Schneider Super Digitar 28XL lens, Leaf Aptus-II 12 and Cambo WRS-333 levelling head.

The Wide RS system has been developed from the demands of architectural, interior and landscape photographers who want a lightweight portable camera to produce the finest quality images. Self locking lateral and vertical shift is on the rear of the camera Up/Down 25/15mm, Left/Right 20/20mm. When using the Aptus-II 12 (sensor size 53.7 x 40mm) the optical movement is 15/13mm.

Andy’s choice of lens was the Schneider 5,6/28 XL Apo-Digitar with copal 0 shutter, with an image circle of 90mm at f11. The lens is mounted in a helical focus mount producing extremely sharp images from 0,4m to infinity.

The following are comments from Andy Haslam;

My clients often ask for high resolution images that can be cropped and re-sized. The Aptus-II 12 captures images with such a high resolution it enables me to offer the client images that can be printed on large format printers, print complete or cropped sections and print CMYK for publication whilst retaining the dynamic range of the file.

I started the capture process by composing each image and previewing on a Mac laptop using Leaf’s Live View. The Live View feature enables me to check composition & focus which refreshes the screen at 5 frames per second. As Leaf backs are cooled by an internal fan using this function doesn’t affect the quality of the image.

Whenever shooting with wide angle lenses and using large format cameras with movements there is colour distortion and lens fall off. For each image I captured a diffused lens calibration which was processed with a shot whenever I’d applied movement. When processed this gives me a new raw file to work from. Each movement requires this but is is sure way of eliminating casts and distortion.

Using a digital back on the Wide RS is quick and easy. The self locking rear movement is smooth, accurate and is engineered so when you use a digital back the mechanism remains in position. Cambo supply lenses fitted with a helical focussing mount, simply turn the ring and your image is in focus.

The light available was minimal, my exposures were between 18-20 seconds at f11. There was a small amount of rise/fall used which required a calibration file. I processed he files with the calibration file when necessary using Leaf Capture v11.4 or you could use Capture One v6.2

I prefer using Leaf Capture as it has all the functionality I need to capture a file, judge the exposure and create the calibration files. Leaf Capture also has the ability to re-save an adjusted file as a raw file which can be repurposed and then you can batch process the files with your own settings.

The shoot of course was successful and the client was impressed with the higher resolution files.

Leaf have just updated Leaf Capture to v11.5 adding more functionality to the back with a new user interface. When shooting with the Wide RS I can now make the calibration files and store them on my Compact Flash card. The workflow process has a speed improvement and there are new outdoor capture functions that will certainly be useful when I’m out on location.

The results can be found on my website under ‘residential’ at www.andyhaslam.com

Cambo Wide RS and lenses Link

Leaf Aptus-II 12 Link

My system was supplied by Cambo UK charles.woods@cambo.com