Eyes

Fred Berg · Sep 7, 2012

View attachment 19616

C&C appreciated.

Jaemie · Sep 7, 2012

I love old wood. Well, who does not? Hehe.. The histogram shows a fair amount of lost black, but I don't see very much in the image. And it's a very nice photo of old weathered wood! Yes, the eyes are watching us through the years, across generations. That little bit of unweathered, revealed, brown wood gives a nice sense of perspective, visually and emotionally. This is the first photo taken with a Sigma DP1 that I've seen. How do you like that camera? It seems quite capable, as this photo demonstrates.

Fred Berg · Sep 8, 2012

Jaemie said:
I love old wood. Well, who does not? Hehe.. The histogram shows a fair amount of lost black, but I don't see very much in the image. And it's a very nice photo of old weathered wood! Yes, the eyes are watching us through the years, across generations. That little bit of unweathered, revealed, brown wood gives a nice sense of perspective, visually and emotionally. This is the first photo taken with a Sigma DP1 that I've seen. How do you like that camera? It seems quite capable, as this photo demonstrates.

Thanks, Jaemie. I think one or two of the cracks and crevices as well as some of the knots in the wood are quite dark anyway, add the PP work on the levels and this might account for the black in the histogram. I'm slowly getting more serious about digital, so it's early days for me as far as understanding the subtleties of the info contained in histograms, so I could be well off the mark there.

As far as the DP1 is concerned, I think it's a great little camera but it takes a little getting used to. There's no optical zoom or stabilisation/vibration reduction built in, which are more or less standard these days I think, but I just love the 16.6 mm lens (equivalent to 28mm in 35mm film terms). The aperture goes from f4 to f11, which sounds a little restrictive at first, but when you consider that despite the camera's compact size it packs an APS-C sensor, then I don't find there's any issue with achieving a good DOF. The down side of f4 as the largest aperture is the lack of sensitivity in low light, and here the AF also gets into trouble; but I have a small tripod for the camera and the MF is very good, plus the pop-up flash is also very good. It has a Foeveon chip, which means the 14 odd MP is effectively just under 5 MP for each of the layers, and so the size of the image file produced is a little on the small size, but it can shoot RAW and I find I can print quite well even from the jpeg mode. The very good thing is that having a metal case it's very robust, and in this class of camera I haven't seen any others built so well (even if the display leaves a lot to be desired at 2.5 inch and just shy of 250,000 pixels).

This image was taken in jpeg-fine mode, by the way.