Why Medium Format

I work mainly in natural underwater environments in Mexico, especially in the cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula. These places hold an extraordinary amount of detail, texture, energy, and light, far more than a single frame can easily contain.

For a long time, my equipment could not keep up with what I was seeing. I could sense the richness in front of me, the interaction between rock, water, skin, and sunlight, but my camera simply could not capture it with the depth and precision the scene deserved. Something was always lost in translation between what I experienced underwater and what appeared in the final image.

Medium format changed that. Specifically, the Phase One XF paired with the IQ4 150MP digital back. As far as I know, I am the only underwater artist and freediver in the world creating work with this system.

The resolution and dynamic range this system offers allow me to hold onto details that would otherwise disappear: the texture of limestone worn smooth over centuries, the way light fractures as it passes through moving water, the subtle variations in skin as a body twists through a beam of sunlight. At 150 megapixels, none of these details are decorative. They are part of what makes an image feel alive rather than simply accurate, and part of what allows a single frame to be printed at gallery scale without ever losing that precision.

There is also a difference in how the interaction between elements reads at this level of resolution. Rocks, water, skin, movement, and sunlight stop existing as separate components arranged in a frame and start behaving like a single, continuous surface, responding to the same light, shaped by the same forces. That cohesion is much harder to achieve, and much easier to lose, with less capability behind the lens. The IQ4 150MP back, in particular, holds onto tonal range in a way that keeps the deepest shadows and the brightest shafts of underwater light both fully present in the same frame, something I struggled to preserve with smaller sensors.

Once I moved to the Phase One XF IQ4 150MP system, I knew I could never go back. Not because smaller formats cannot produce beautiful work, they clearly can, but because I had finally found a tool capable of matching what I was already seeing underwater, rather than asking me to simplify it.