Morning Pano with the Dp2

So the Littlest Guy was talking all morning this morning, starting at around 4:30 and just continuing. After about an hour or so of this, I got up and took him from his exhausted mother to go wandering around to try to get him to sleep. On my way out the door, I saw this:

This is a pano of three shots stitched together. I actually shot about 30, but the three I used were the ones with the least blur. It turns out, the best way to avoid motion blur from just holding the camera in one hand with a squirming baby in the other is to set your exposure to manual, aperture to f/5.0 (for reasonable sharpness, even though everything's at infinity), infinity manual focus, and a shutter speed of 1/80. I used 1/40, which meant that the vast majority of my shots were blurry, and only a few salvagable. Luckily, they were positioned in the region I wanted to give me the image I wanted (though not as wide as I would have liked). I used the incredible Autostitch to make it work.

I might have been able to have taken this in one shot with the Dp1, just because it's got a wider lens; but then, I'd have two of these cameras, and that's a bit much.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Found in LACMA, these shots just hurt.

Stare at them for about thirty seconds and tell me if you don't agree:

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and

While this one just hurts my social conscience:

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It's cool to see just how far art has come from this:

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and, even further back, this:

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All photos courtesy of the Dp2. Check out the rest here.

Where the Dp2 just absolutely falls down

On the last night that my brother Paul and his wife Valerie were in town, they sold a copy of their print, America the Beautiful, to my boss/advisor/mentor, Daniel V. Daniel wanted a picture taken with them, and so I tried with the Dp2. This was the result:

Focus was off, and the thing just couldn't figure it out. I can only ask people to sit still for so long, and the back LCD was just painfully useless for focus finding in the relatively low light of my living room.

This was the result using the Nikon d300, 17-55 f/2.8 lens, and sb900 flash:

So, when compared to ~$3k of photography gear that I use to shoot weddings, the Dp2 is just not quite there yet. It's also one quarter the price.

Spp 3.5.2 is much better

My first few posts, I bitched about the quality of the SPP program. No more! SPP 3.5.2 has addressed all of my concerns except cropping. Sure, it slows down when I'm running massive matlab processing routines in the background, but if it didn't, then it would be violating the laws of computer science.

It's also easier to go from what I had to this:



from the first time I posted the shot, in this post here, where Thomas had Alien Eyes and the photo itself was very, very dark.

The more I look at these, the more I realize I really need to calibrate my monitor sometime soon.

Fireworks and the Dp2

Fireworks shots can be tricky. It requires timing and technique in order to get it right.

First, you'll probably want to stop down to f/8 or something like that. Fireworks are bright, and they will easily blow past your sensor's dynamic range if you leave the aperture at 2.8 and expose for a while.

Expose for more than a second. At one second, unless your timing is really, really good, you'll only get about half of any given burst. 2.5 or even 5 seconds is the right amount.

Because you'll be exposing for a long time, make sure to use a tripod. If you don't use a tripod, you still have to stabilize your camera; no stabilization makes for wonky trails effects.

If you can, try to frame the firework with something else. The shots I took yesterday didn't have anything to really frame with, except in one shot, by a lucky accident.

With that having been said, enjoy!







I like this shot, although you can see the need for a tripod here. Problem is, a lot of these shots were fairly well stabilized (even though a stroller hardly qualifies as particularly stable), so I can't really be sure if the jitters in this image are from wind or from the camera moving. Usually, when all the trails of the fireworks move together, it's from camera movement, but I don't think that's what happened here. I may be just fooling myself because I like the shot.



This last shot showed some very interesting postprocessing recovery. I don't know if the thumbnail production on the Dp2 is just really bad compared to the raw output, but the following image was just a mass of white where the large burst is. But, because I shot in raw, that white was easily recovered into some very cool trails:



And finally, the serendipetous shot of someone else in the crowd chimping. I would say something snarky like "Firewroks Watching: Yer doin' it wrong!", but I was guilty myself of chimping a fair share throughout the show.

Simpler Times

Ah, simpler times.
When a man could go to a beach and fly a kite.







When people would take black and white photos.

(gotta love that extreme detail...)

When a bunch of friends could gather on a beach...


... and drink a frosty beverage.


This July 3rd semi-nostalgia has been brought to you by the Dp2.

Sigma Dp2: Focus

Focusing with the Sigma Dp2 can be a bit of a trial. The difficulty lies in the tradeoff: Do you want the super thin f/2.8 when closely focused, or do you want to get everything in the foreground in focus while also sharpening the background? Personally, I've always tended to go for the former rather than the latter, but that's because I think the d300 with 60mm lens is a bit more forgiving than the 24mm the dp2 has.

I really like the colors in this one:

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But the focus is such that certain branches are out of focus, and the whole image is close to what I want, but far enough away that it really bugs me.

I should go to f/4, at least, but then when I'm faced with some fast-moving bees, then it's hard enough to capture them with a slower aperture:

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And if I'm careful about putting the focus point on the closest portion of the object in the frame, then the image comes out fine:

larger:
Larger Image Here.

On a side note about battery life: this is in the first five cycles of the camera battery, which are supposed to be the weakest. I took roughly thirty minutes to walk around the block and take these photos, and by the end, the battery went from 3 bars to dead. A second battery is a must.

I also think I've figured out why SPP irritates me so much-- you can't cancel an operation. If the program let me go from one image to the next with more rapidity, I think it would feel like less of a dog. The images it produces really are superb, but the lack of responsiveness seems to be the biggest impediment to me liking it.

Having said all of that! Here's a shot that I particularly like, if only that I could walk up to the nest to take it:

Larger version here.

Yay, birds!

Sigma Dp2 Second Impressions

(another cross-post from the dpreview forums: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=32252929)

My biggest gripe was the speed of SPP. I've since sat here and done a bit more accurate timing with a stopwatch.

For many photos, the program takes 2-5 seconds, which is just this side of irritating. On the occasional photo, though, it takes around 20 seconds, with the progress bar just locked in the middle. I don't know what the difference is with those photos, and the timing problem doesn't seem to be consistent; looking at the same photo a second time may or may not produce the same timing lag. That behavior suggests to me that there's some threading issues, and I'd wonder if people on older machines who find the program works very well are also on single processor machines.

But that's secondary to the camera, really.

I took the camera to a country club for an event, and then to my sister-in-law's house. The interior of her house is pretty dim, so that was a good test of interior shots (our own house, in comparison, has many many windows, and far less interesting things to shoot).

One of my photography mentors, at the country club:

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I'm diggin' the use of this camera as a portrait device; since it's mostly silent (except for the focusing motor), people don't really notice when it's being used on them.

Some people pay great attention:

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The problem there was that he was too close, and it was too dark in there to get really accurate focus. I'm using firmware 1.0.2, but it's still a bit difficult for the camera to find things. I still think the photo is a good capture of him but I wish the focus point had been on is eyes, which was my intention.

This photo was of a mural inside the club:

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It was shot at ISO 100, which meant that I could not see it at all on the viewfinder and had to push it up to +2 exp and with a great deal of X3 fill light in order to see anything. At 1/40, it's somewhat lucky that I was able to get a shot without hand-held blurring.

Because the sensor is so sharp, it's not as forgiving with handheld shots as a d300, in my experience. Close examination of portraits especially show slight blurring, as here:

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Pixel peeping on this (and other) shots will show slight blurring. The shot was at 1/40, which for a lens that's 41mm equivalent, should have been fine to stop motion and so forth, assuming they were still (which they were). So, I really have to bump to something like 1/60 with people, just to get the most out of the sharpness of the lens and the sensor.

A quick note on metering. The metering performance is not very good when moving from sunlight to shade. I'm used to metering being done off of the current focus spot (and have set my spot metering accordingly), but moving from shade with 1/13 metering at ISO 100 to sunlight keeps the same 1/13 metering. Only after about ten seconds or so does the metering seem to catch on. I've found myself really switching into manual mode more in order to catch everything.

The flash is quite good, with the expected redeye that will need to be fixed in postprocessing (would be great if SPP had it...):

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Her hair is that red. Speaking of color, this succulent appeared to be way, way more green than in real life. I think the effect is cool, but it's also very artificial in appearance, especially in the out-of-focus areas:

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All other test shots: http://www.markmroden.com/gallery/8704093_zsKmR#575287740_Dt5Ph

All in all, I'm really getting into this camera. It's not a very rapid shooter, and I find that that means I can't just spam shots and hope that one of fifteen work out. I recently shot a wedding with a second shooter and an assistant, and all told, we had some 3.3k shots at the end of the day. One third that number would be unattainable on a Dp2; the battery life isn't that good, and the camera isn't so fast as to take the same shot three times in a row so you can choose the 'best' one later in post. I'm forced to think, to compose, to stop and ask what it is I want to shoot, which means that I'm getting back into photography as a hobby rather than as a business. That's exactly what I need right now, so the Dp2 is perfect for me at the moment.