DIMW - Digital ImageMaker World

Recently I was off testing three cameras:
Nikon D300
Olympus E-510
Sony A350

So I decided to take the same image of the same scene, pull the red channel for the mono conversion and compare the results.

Nikon D300

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The last few months have been challenging here at DIMi.

Just before Easter my father-in-law died. It was not unexpected to me, having seen a number of people pass, but other members of the family were not prepared. As you could imagine, it was very disruptive to everything. DIMi suffered, given that we work from a home office, plus my attention was not really there.

Over the following months things have settled down a lot and a lot of photography has been happening. But as anyone who has been through someone like this will know, depression and grief go hand in hand, and there have certainly been times when we have had little energy to do much.

Despite all this we’ve got some great things underway at DIMi. In February DIMi became the most popular Australian photography website among Australians and since then we have risen up the US photography site rankings to be in reach of some of the long established big names. We have started our ImageMaker Tips on a challenging bi-daily initial schedule and these are proving very popular. The emails from readers are flowing in and it is obvious that more and more photographers are trusting our reviews and enjoying the advice on our sites.

There is a lot of background work going on. We are working on individual RSS feeds not only for the ImageMaker Tips but for other key topic areas, such as cameras, photography and press releases, and a major effort is underway to add newsletters to DIMi. More news on this soon. And of course there is the general maintenance to do. Server changes at our hosting service took the gallery of digitalimagemakerworld.com down and we are still working hard to get it back. It has been this which has held up the competition announcements recently.

Several new initiatives should be rolling out by the end of June. The first of these is dimagemaker.net, a huge gallery site that will offer free galleries to photographers and digital artists producing strong work. The second is a companion site to dimagemaker.com called animagemaker.com, which will allow us to expand into analogue photography coverage and a major effort to profile photographers producing stunning work, whether on film or digital.

All the above would already in place had there not been the personal stresses of recent months. But then maybe things needed to go slower.

I’ve been out doing more shooting with the Sigma 4.5mm circular fisheye lens with my converted for infrared Canon 350D.

I’ve found that the best way to shoot IR with this fisheye, because of the size of the field of view, is to use exposure bracketing with the camera set on continuous drive mode so that I can take three images in rapid succession with one press of the shutter button. This I have found to be the best way to handle the exposure variations in IR with such a wide field of view.

Below are more images.
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Wayne reconsiders some of his recent photographs and explores how they look using a favored technique of his.
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We are all human and a recent stuff up on my part makes that clear if I had forgotten it.

I’ve been testing the new Sigma 4.5mm and 10mm fisheye lenses. Both lenses have strange lens caps, in that there is a normal lens cap, plus a lens shade-like extension so that the actual lens cap does not interfere with either the projecting lens (in the case of the 4.5mm) or the minimal lens shade (with the 10mm). I had noted this on the 10mm but not on the 4.5mm. So I put out an initial article about using the 4.5mm with my infrared converted Canon 350D. When it was pointed out to me what was going on, I quickly had to go out, do some more shooting and then put a corrected article up on the site.

One of the things I love about the Internet is that I can quickly post a correction, hopefully before someone makes a wrong purchase decision based on it. Of course I could have just pulled the wrong article but the pictures in it are interesting in their own right and honesty I think needs to apply. So I posted a new follow-up article and cross-linked them.

New camera gear is exciting and I am as prone to this as anyone.

A recent trip away to test a couple of cameras, and the shooting of one scene in particular, really brought home the meaning of those camera numbers.

Recently I combined the need to get away with the need to test a couple of cameras, specifically the Olympus E-3 and the Pentax K20D. The shooting of one particular scene really brought home to me the meaning of a couple of numbers.

The two images below were shot about a minute apart from roughly the same position (I was dodging waves, so there was some movement). One was with the Pentax K20D fitted with the Sigma 10-20mm zoom, shot at 10mm. The other was taken with the Olympus E-3 and the Zuiko 12-60mm zoom, at 12mm.

Now when you get to the wide-angle end of the focal length range, 2mm of focal length can make a significant difference to the field of view. On a 35mm film camera a 10mm lens has a field of view of 130 degrees, while the 12mm covers 122 degrees.

But another number that makes a huge difference here is the focal length multiplication factor. The Olympus has a 2.0x multiplication factor, whilst the Pentax has a 1.5x factor. That means the 12mm on the Olympus is effectively 24mm, while the 10mm on the Pentax is effectively 15mm, in 35mm terms. The field of view (FOV) of a 24mm has a FOV of 84 degrees with the 15mm covering 110 degrees, a huge difference.

So what does all this mean? Well, firstly you have to pay attention to the numbers when making any decisions involving cameras. Secondly system choices, especially sensor size, have huge implications for your actual picture taking. What should be an amazingly wide lens becomes only a moderately wide one on the Olympus system because of the tiny sensor. Of course sensor size has other implications, something I’ll be looking at in other articles.

Recently I was in Sydney for an Autodesk press event and since I had the afternoon free before my flight back to Melbourne I went out shooting with my converted (by MaxMax.com) Canon 350D.

A gallery of my Sydney Infrared images can be seen in the Digital ImageMaker World Gallery.

Yes, you read the title right: the digital imagemaker returns to film. But not exclusively or even frequently.

Lately I have been experimenting with long exposure photography. As we all know with our digital cameras the noise level rises with the length of the exposure. So I wanted to compare this with film. I dug out my old Mamiyaflex C220, cobbled up some step-up rings and fitted my modified Cokin filter holder so I could use the Cokin 13-stop neutral density filter and went out shooting. The camera (well lens actually) is not up to general shooting. The shutter had no use for almost 10 years and so it does not fire properly and can’t take proper short exposures. But on bulb it works and is loud enough that I can hear when the stutter eventually opens and start the stopwatch.

Results on the photography are still a work in progress but I feel I am getting there. But boy was it a shock going back to film. No immediate feedback, no surety that it worked and the quickest feedback is a day turnaround on the film processing (it is 120 format, so no 1 hour shops, at least here). You have to wind the film on (what a horror) and loading the film is a hassle. Plus lack of familiarity with the camera after so long screwed up a couple of rolls.

Apart from possibly addressing the noise issue with long exposures, I am also seeking higher resolution. This is why I am using medium format rather than 35mm. I am curious to try large format but not just yet. A twin lens reflex, like my old Mamiya is perfect if you are going to use extremely dark filters, such as heavy ND (neutral density) filters because you can still see to focus and compose with the other lens.

Of course I’ll be scanning the negatives and working on them on the computer. So at least it is half digital. More reports as the experiment continues.

Size does matter. But not in the way it is commonly expressed.

Recently I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mind who is also a photographer. We were talking about all the new camera releases at the current PMA show, and specifically the release of the new Canon 450D and the non-release of the expected replacement for the 5D. He and I both have a 350D and I also have a 400D. I made the observation that it is amazing just how good these cameras are and how they have taken a lot of use and abuse and exposure to the elements. Whilst I would love the full frame capabilities of the 5D (or 6D) or even better the 1Ds Mark III, I certainly did not want to carry one around. I also related how, last year when over in Barcelona and Arles I spent time with a group of photographers. One of these was a woman photographer shooting with a 5D. At some point of walking around in the heat with our gear she asked to try my 400D and was so impressed with the resulting images and its low weight that she decided she needed one.

All the above is to set the focus for discussion of camera weight and suitability. I don’t know about you but my camera bag, if I took most of my gear, would weigh a ton. Some of my lenses are L-series and thus heavy. Plus of course there are a few. So the weight adds up there in lenses. Then a flash gun and all the other accessories. So when I go out shooting I tend to try to estimate what I will need and pack accordingly. Even with small cameras the weight gets heavy. There is a noticeable weight increase as you go from the 400D to the 40D, then again to the 5D and then more to the 1Ds Mark III. I am not suggesting that weight should be the only determining factor but, I think if we are honest, it is a factor for more of us than you would think. Olympus, for example, did very well with its OM-1 and OM-2 models, which were amazingly capable cameras that showed that you do not have to get bigger and heavier as you go up the price range. This should be especially the case today, when so much of the functionality of a camera is a software function and so basically takes up no extra space.

At the present time we have the mentality among the marketing people of the camera companies, or at least it seems that way, that small and compact means low end and that if people are going to pay more for a camera that they must be larger. This is a strange mentality when, say, in notebook computers the cheapest are the middle sized ones, and they get more expensive at both ends of the size range. I believe that rather there is a fair section of the dSLR buying public who want great quality pictures and control from a compact and light camera body.For this I think we need two things: a dSLR family that offers varying capability at varying price and a compact camera like the Canon G9 that has an SLR-sized image sensor and a 3x zoom for those times when even a compact SLR is too big. Imagine the option of a 400D sized model with a full frame sensor and a G9 with an APS or even better full size sensor. Wouldn’t they be models you would want to have?

Another thing to be noted it that there are a great many people who need high quality camera gear who are not primarily photographers, such as digital artists. They may well be less willing to carry heavy gear but still want great images. Now some will be happy with compact cameras but most will want the lower noise and greater control that a dSLR or high quality compact will offer. Even for photographers there are times when you do not want the photography to be the main focus, but you want a camera with you. For times like that the large sensor G9 I suggest would be perfect.

Note that I am not saying that the current smaller sensor G9 is not an amazing camera or is capable of great images. But for those of us where the quality of the image or the degree of control we want is paramount, it would be nice to have the option without having to break your back.

I hadn’t shot a lot recently. Other commitments plus the silly season had tied me up and kept me substantially away from the camera.

But, last week, we got away to the family beach house for a week and I managed to do a lot of shooting. Some experimental stuff didn’t work out. But that is the way it goes. But I also got a lot of great results. One of these is the shot below, an infrared image shot with my converted Canon 350D near Cape Schank in Victoria.

It was so great to get back behind a camera, spiritual in a way. I loved it and came back rejuvenated and ready to get stuck into a new round of camera reviews on DIMi.