What do I love about the IQ250? I don't even know where to begin.
My name is Sal Cincotta
and I'm a wedding and portrait photographer based in Illinois.
I was exposed to photography at a very early age in my life.
At 16 my aunt had shown me photography, she had a dark room
in her basement, she used to take me out and just let me shoot away with it and it didn't
really matter what I was getting. I photographed my first wedding at about 17 years old and
I hated every single minute of it. And the reason is simple: Back in the 1980's it was
not cool or fun to be a wedding photographer. Everything was very stiff, very traditional.
And my true passion was landscape and architecture. So it is really interesting now to be a wedding
photographer looking back at my roots, so to speak. Because in my work today you can
absolutely see that architecture plays a major influence on my work that I produce not only
for myself, but for my clients. So fast forward another 20-25 years, I once again revisited
wedding photography. Only this time in 2005-2006 it was cool to be a wedding photographer.
We are creating memories for people for a lifetime. Things that they would hang on their
walls and look at as pieces of art more than just a snapsnot. And it was that thought that
drew me back into becoming a wedding photographer. And please understand, I started in corporate
America, so I went off to business school, thought I was going to be an attorney. Started
photographing weddings on the side, portraits on the side, and I soon realized that I loved
photography! This is what I wanted to do, this is what I wanted to be. Going to work,
working in a cubicle just sucked. That was not my future, that was not my passion.
I am doing today what I was born to do and that is being a wedding and portrait photographer.
I'm really about the big architectural portrait. I want to create what I call a 'signature
edit' for my client. That piece of art that they are hanging on the wall. When they have
friends and family over, they are looking at that and it is this beautiful picture of
as bridge, of a landscape, in the middle of the street. And their friends go: "Oh my god,
that is a beautiful picture - oh wow - you're in it!" I got to be honest when I first spoke
to the people at Phase One about the IQ250 I was a bit snobbish about the whole thing
and definitely pessimistic. I just felt like there was no possible way that the Phase One
was going to match the quality that I was getting from my 35mm system. It wasn't possible,
alright? And it was too expensive, so any quality that could be gained just wasn't worth
the extra price. I got my hands on one and
right after I took the first frame, all I could think about was how
I had to have this camera. I didn't want to let my excitement show, I wanted to play my
cards close to the chest. When I saw that first image come off the camera I was blown away
at the quality. You have got to think about it: 14 stops of dynamic range. There is no
other camera out there, I know of, that has that true dynamic range, that true quality.
It is not just about megapixels anymore. It is about having quality come back from every
photograph you make. 14 stops of dynamic range is just the beginning. Now you got low light
performance in the IQ250 to 6400 ISO. Again, I played pessismist. I'm like there is no
way this camera is going to perform in low light, so we tested it. We didn't just test
it and looked at the back of the camera. We tested it, loaded it up in Capture One and
then zoomed in to look at the detail, look at the noise. And once again I was blown away
by the quality of these images. It produced nothing but usable images from ISO100 to ISO6400.
That is the level of quality and performance that I need to know with confidence that I
can perform, capture, document in a way that allow me and my studio to stand out from the
crowd and produce superior quality imagery for our clients. My advice to anyone considering
the medium format platform is to think about, if you are committed to producing a superior
quality image, it doesn't matter where you are in your career. Whether you are just starting
out, whether you are a 5 year studio looking to reinvent yourself, the IQ250 is truly groundbreaking
in what it is offering us as photographers. It is offering us a freedom and a level of
quality never before available to us.