A photo, every twelve seconds. (UPDATE!) March 30, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : News & Rumors , add a commentI obviously missed some things in that Pop Photo review of the Sigma DP1 that I read the other day. They’re saying it takes 12 seconds to save a RAW file to the memory card! I did another quick glance through the article (yeah I really should re-read it fully but I don’t have time right now) and found no mention of what card they were using. I hope they mention in there because that would be sloppy testing to not state what equipment they were using.
Overall their reporting on it is a bit confusing. One shot takes 12 seconds to save, but can it be used during that time? Additionally, a three shot burst (at 3fps) takes 23 seconds to save before the camera can be used again. Obviously it would appear to have too small a buffer and a rather slow write speed since a file is roughly 13MB according to Sigma. If it is as unresponsive as it sounds, and you have to wait that often when shooting RAW frames, I will definitely be passing on this camera. My dinosaur of a camera (1D Mark II) can save a 6.5MB raw file to a Sandisk Ultra II + card in about a second and a half, give or take. CF write speed is faster, but with the larger buffer of the camera it’s not an issue most of the time. Theoretically that means my camera is able to write about 4x faster to my card than whatever card they used with the DP1.
Let’s hope it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Update:
According to various users and some rumors I’m reading, write times for a RAW file may be as short as 2 seconds with a SanDisk Extreme III card. Doesn’t look so bad after all!
The last snowfall of the season? March 29, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , 1 comment so farWe got some snow the other night, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s going to be our last for this season. I decided to head out and try to catch some photos before the sun was gone while there was still some snow. I wound up at Mendon Ponds and shot some photos there before wandering some of the nearby back-roads looking for future photo opportunities. As of the moment this is the only one I’ve processed but I’m looking at the others to see what I can do with them.
This was taken with a 9 stop ND filter as well as a polarizer rotated to maximize the reflection off the lake. Since I didn’t bring much else with me I had to do some work in Photoshop to bring the sky and trees to the left in line with what I wanted it to look like.
Three more weeks from 2008 PAD March 27, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentMy Photo-A-Day project continues so far and I’ve uploaded galleries for weeks two through four finally. You can see the first post containing week one here:
http://www.thecolorblindphotographer.com/2008/01/08/2008-photo-a-day/
Just to keep things nice and easy I’ll post week one right along with the rest right:
http://gallery.thecolorblindphotographer.com/2008PAD/Week1/
http://gallery.thecolorblindphotographer.com/2008PAD/Week2/
http://gallery.thecolorblindphotographer.com/2008PAD/Week3/
http://gallery.thecolorblindphotographer.com/2008PAD/Week4/
Here are a few samples of what you can see in the galleries above:
More will be coming in the future (hopefully soon).
One thing I’ve played with some in these (and others that have yet to be posted) is color. I’m not worried about representing the real colors of objects in all of these. Sometimes I do, but others are meant to be more imaginative or unusual. If I’m not trying for realism it’s obviously quite easy but it’s often a challenge to determine whether the colors really make sense when I’m trying to represent reality. This is something I will be writing more about in future posts since I haven’t really discussed it much to date.
The quest for the DP1 March 26, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentAwkwardly I don’t think I’ve talked much about this camera here, but it’s been on my mind for over a year. I’ve been soul searching for a good digital camera with a fast, fixed lens and large “SLR sized” sensor for several years now.
My Olympus Stylus Epic, although probably the lowest of such film cameras, was a great tool and a lot of fun to use. As a result of that I have longed for a digital eqivalent; something compact, unassuming yet capable of excellent image quality. Even though numerous P&S digital cameras can certainly provide acceptable image quality and nothing prevents them from being a serious (whatever that means) tool, they certainly lack some things. Usually the performance of their overstuffed sensors is not very good, their lenses are average, and by virtue of their extremely short focal length lenses they cannot achieve much DOF control. All these things have given me a love-hate relationship with every P&S I’ve owned or used. They’re capable of so much, but fall short on certain things that endlessly irk me.
When I first found out a year ago about the DP1 I was excited. A 4.7mp Foveon X3 based 1.7 crop SLR sized sensor in a compact body with a fixed lens. The downsides were certain aspects of the Foveon sensor but more importantly the rather short (28mm equiv on a 35mm full frame camera) and slow f/4 lens. My experience with the Foveon sensors is rather poor high ISO performance so that doesn’t combine well with a max ISO of 800 and a max aperture of f/4. Either way, it held promise and I eagerly waited to see it released. After multiple delays and an apology from Sigma, it’s finally on its way to people, for the princely sum of $800.
On technical merit alone I don’t consider it an $800 camera. For that kind of money I could pick up a digital Rebel and the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 and have a whole lot more camera. The problem is that’s also a lot more camera in the volumetric sense. One key aspect of the DP1 I’m interested in, and no doubt the reason they will probably get away with charging $800, is that it offers everything it does in such a small package.
Based on what I can learn about the camera from spec sheets I’m concerned and feeling it may not be the solution I’m looking for. But I’m holding out hope that some good reviews from users and sites I trust like dpreview.com will give me a better feeling for it. I’m sitting here with money in hand, but the camera has to prove itself first.
Ghost does homework March 24, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentI just realized I never posted these here, but I figure I should have. These are what I call “selectively un-desaturated” since that follows the overall process of creating them. These were shot in the Fall of 2006 while I was doing some work and my cat Ghost was trying very hard to help. Eventually he just stole my pencil and started playing with it.
Recently I decided to reprocess these, the color really wasn’t adding anything to them I thought. After desaturating them with the channel mixer I changed my mind, sort of, and decided to remove the channel mixer layer mask from his eyes and the pencil. I thought both might go together well since to my eyes they’re similar colors and it provided a nice subject for some of these.
Without any further delay:
Along the Erie Canal March 22, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentLast week I walked along the Erie Canal two days in a row for a break from the usual and to see whether there was anything that might catch my eye photographically. I wound up under the Winton Rd bridge a lot, and the second day made use of the 90mm Tilt-Shift to enable me to take a couple photos like these:
I relied on using some tilt in both cases since there was no way to set up a tripod and even if a smaller aperture gave me enough DOF, I wouldn’t have been able to hand hold it. I also re-approached this from another part of the bridge to see if the colors and textures would come out better and I think they did this time.
I had also noticed while I was wandering around that a bike was stuck in the canal. It had me thinking that it might have been down there a while since the water level was quite low in the canal which might have revealed it. Otherwise it would have fallen in recently or before the canal iced over because up until a few weeks before the day I was out there most of the canal was covered in ice I believe and this bike looked like it landed in the canal face first.
Gloom over Lake Ontario March 3, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentSaturday I went up to Lake Ontario with a friend I hadn’t seen for a couple years to talk through some troubles with him. He wanted to walk out the pier on Charlotte Beach so I brought along my camera just in case it was worthwhile to snap a few pictures. Apparently the pier is usually closed off with an ineffective barrier of some sort but it was wide open and uncleared like the rest of the beach-park. That made for a slippery and unsteady walk, especially with the strong and wet crosswind and the sub-freezing temperatures.
We made it about halfway down the pier before the wind seemed to get stronger, and the waves hitting the pier were spraying us with miserably cold water. I knelt down to take a few photos and only got two, with the first one coming out crooked. This was the resulting image, which I originally ignored until I decided to play with a conversion to B&W because the color was not helping it any at all.
Additionally, I’ve been converting & saving out JPEGs of the rest of the Photo-A-Day project so far so galleries (which I promised weeks ago) should be coming up soon.