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:
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.
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