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:

Larger Image here.

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:

Larger Image Here.

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:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/photos/575288880_AikjE-X3.jpg

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:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/photos/575290764_GB2Ua-X3-1.jpg

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:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/photos/575318317_BMo5a-X3.jpg

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:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/575293989_oPpi2-X3.jpg

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...):

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/photos/575322362_b4aBX-X3.jpg

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:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/575291964_MTtk2-X3.jpg

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.

Sigma Dp2 First Impressions

(this post is also at dpreview.com: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=32215272)

My dp2 showed up a day early, and proceeded to occupy what remained of the daylight hours. I figured I'd write a mini review here.
First, I like the camera, but it has its foibles. Namely:

1) Focus! It's painful. If I'm in M mode, I want manual focus to be up all the damn time, not when I occasionally hit the focus button. I'm willing to live with the constraint that focus isn't that rapid (it's actually pretty comparable to a non-AF-S nikon, at least on the subjects I try to focus on, because I always focus on edges). I'm irked by a manual mode that isn't manual.

2) Going around the horn on ISO. I want to be able to select ISO, and then go left or right. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but constantly going to 1600 to go back to 100 is irritating. If there were a way to limit the qs menu from 100, 200, and 400 (for instance), I'd be fine, and a way to set that range for night shooting/day shooting.

3) The shutter seems to have just a touch of lag. I'd see something on the screen, hit the capture button, and then it would capture the moment just a bit later. Not a deal killer, but irking when trying to shoot a kid.

4) I assume that there's some focus lock thing (again with the focus!). I get the focus set how I like, and then I shoot, and the camera readjusts focus (incorrectly, most of the time). This behavior seemed a bit intermittent, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because I took the shot quickly within getting focus?

Now the goodness!

1) I was pleasantly surprised at how closely the lens focused. The range is pretty excellent, for instance getting this shot here:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger image:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/571446513_HRBtd-XL.jpg

That flower was pretty close to the lens, definitely within two feet, probably within one foot. That surprised me.

2) This thing is sharp like a razor, when you get the focus right. Compare:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger image:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/571446979_sxxgv-XL.jpg
with

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

larger image:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/276865140_wfz2T-XL-2.jpg

3) It's possible to get shots of kids:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

original:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/571447696_gWWWa-X3.jpg

That become very nice black and whites:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

original:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/571447236_WiaXr-X3.jpg

4) Black and white conversion has a very interesting graininess to it when converted using SPP:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

original:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/571448723_ga8rq-X3.jpg

Compare that to other Nikon converted b&w's from lightroom at similar iso:

Image control: Zoom out | Zoom 100% | Zoom in | Expand / Contract | New window

original:
http://www.markmroden.com/photos/544992191_Zetcm-X3.jpg

Personally, I prefer the SPP image, and the actual ratio to keepers to throwaways because of movement is comparable.

BUT! The extremely ugly:

SPP is, bar none, the worst image processing software I have ever used. The results are great, but take way way way too long. I have a dual core X2 2 ghz machine with 3 gb of RAM running Windows 7. By no means a screaming machine, but it's absolutely ridiculous that I should wait about a minute just to open an image.

Continuing with enumerations, this software needs:

1) Someone to sit down the an optimizer and Scott Meyer's book on Effective C++. If they're not writing in C++, then they're doing it wrong, period. I'm willing to bet that if I took a look at that code, I would find a whole bunch of nested for loops with the stopping criteria evaluated in the loop rather than assigned to a const-- there's no way this code is this slow without some bad looping.

2) Here's another image processing optimization tip: if you iterate through the image more than once, you're doing it wrong.

3) If you iterate without an iterator or a pointer, you're doing it wrong.

4) Cancel button. That the cancel button appears to be to kill the processing app is just wrong, because it could introduce data corruption issues.

5) Where's crop? I think that there are some basic functions that could be provided here pretty simply, like cropping to particular ratios (either predefined or user entered), or ... Well, really, I just want to crop.

6) It's ok to have a background thread that processes all the images in the specified folder in the background, so that when I open an image, I don't wait a minute for the image to open.

7) What about presets that are available on the camera, like Sepia?

Final verdict: I really, really like this camera. It didn't take me that long to figure out the controls, and I figure that people will immediately correct my focus issues, which is fine. It will definitely replace my d300 as a walkaround camera, but I need more experience with it before I'll feel confident to take it to an event I'm paid to capture.

I will replace SPP as soon as I can. I fantasize that there will be a reasonable Lightroom plugin to process these images, because SPP really is just horrible. The images it makes are beautiful, but I don't buy the argument that good things come to those who wait; when I take 200 images, I don't want to take four days to process them.