Just fallen in love with digital photography, DSLR, remotely controlled speedlights, silk smooth background for portraits, mindbogglingly minor details of little creatures, saturated colours and HDR and it happened all of a sudden that I saw a few photos made with a medium format film camera and scanned after that.
And those photos are great in a way that I think my photos made with my Nikon D80 will never be.
And I am scared of medium format, scared because medium format equipment is way more expensive than that I can afford.

When talking about about medium format photography the first thing that is usually mentioned is its resolution. Medium format is big. Bigger even than full frame. An SLR has a 35mm wide film- and a fullframe DSLR has a the same sized sensor - while the medium format starts at 60mm. A popular size in this world is the 6 cm x 4.5 cm which is often mentioned as 645 in the model name of cameras. Some digital backs result 39 megapixel images. 39 megapixel, can you imagine that?

The next thing is the image characteristics of the medium format. Its large film or sensor results a great perspective on the photos rarely seen on images taken with DSLRs. OK, most of us just cannot afford using fullframe professional DSLRs so the 46° picture angle of an 50mm focal length lens is rather 31.5° for us and we will never be able to make really wide pictures with our cameras. 
The very shallow depth of field resulted by the wide aperture is an other thing that can be very useful or even artistic and can be achieved mostly with expensive lenses. I have the feeling - not confirmed by anyone - that DoF of medium format is shallower than that of DSLRs using lenses of comparable focal length.

Medium and large format film photographers - I am sure - are taking the photos very consciously. What makes me think that is that their equipment and raw materials are so expensive that they simply cannot stay in business by using the trial’n'error approach or even bracketing. This contributes to the quality of their pictures as well.

Photographing to film, especially to high sensitivity one - or even expired one saving some money - results some grainy noise but such a strange one that is not distracting and doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the picture negatively. I don’t know the reason for that. Maybe we are so accustomed to photos on paper and that kind of noise that we miss it in case of the digital photos.

My conclusion is that I don’t like the idea of falling in love with medium format photography because that would impact very badly on my family’s financies :-), but I already love looking at photos made with that kind of equipment.

Images were made by Balázs Fenyő.