Tuesday, May 20, 2008

DP1 low light





Two more low light shots.  One was at asa 800 and the other asa 800 -2EV, so that's somewhere around asa 3200.  I did very little to these, just let SPP develop them.  I did pull middle grey WB from the same place (lighthouse).  It's interesting how the colors are different. 

I see swatches or streaks of green, most obvious in the white painted molding.  As I shoot low light shots with expectations of B&W conversion it makes less difference.

For the B&W I went just about as simple as possible, lowered the saturation.  No other heroics.

All in all not bad at all for a stealthy pocket camera. The DP1 may not do all that well in bench tests.  I'll try to remember that if I get a gig doing bench tests.  For other, real life situations it does pretty darn good.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to post all this useful info about the dp1. It's been very helpful as I struggle to figure out whether or not to buy one.

All the best,
Eric

Charles Maclauchlan said...

Eric:
I do understand the decisions we make before buying a camera. There is not only the money, which is sizeable but also the time spent with the thing.

My feelings about 35mm SLR's is that technology allowed us a new plateau over the camera designs it replaced, tilts swings viewing screens loupes etc. So to digital offers the opportunity for another such advancement. I had hoped digital would free us from large cameras with flapping mirrors. Now obviously there are engineering constraints but nevertheless I was inclined to buy the first small camera with a large sensor.

I would suggest that if this will be the "family" camera, the one to take pictures of the the kids playing then perhaps it's not the correct choice. I was disappointed by the delay between shots while it writes to the card. Perhaps future firmware upgrades will fix this. The shutter lag some mention is easily eliminated with the manual focus and so just isn't a problem for me.

On the other hand, while I would RUN from a camera with the problems I mentioned ... the images I have gotten, from the very start, just amaze me. The quality of the lens is substantially more than I had expected and the sensor, completely unknown to me previously. is a gem. These images have caused me to take another critical look at the last 2 years work with my Nikon DSLR and frankly a lot of my stuff just doesn't warrant the ratings I had given it.

There are some (me) who feel that good cameras can be resold for a major percentage of their cost, which would mitigate the damage from a bad decision. Best of luck.

Regards
Charles

obakesan said...

Hi

if you have time, I'd be keen to see an examination of how the images look when splitting the colour channels, similar to what I did here.

http://home.people.net.au/~cjeastwd/digital/inCameraArtifacts.html

thanks :-)