I think I men­tioned this in the past, but (provided you shoot RAW) you can save a lot of images. Take this one for instance, which was badly under­ex­posed (I wanted to take this pic­ture quickly, but the cam­era was still in manual mode and the expos­ure was set for an out­side scene).

Any­way, usu­ally I delete pic­tures like that right away in cam­era, but when the little one’s in it, I try not to be too delete-​happy — you never know.

And indeed, bring­ing the expos­ure up three stops (!) and thanks to the amaz­ing dynamic range of mod­ern digital cam­eras, there she is. Of course, push­ing the expos­ure by this much brings in a ton of noise, but remem­ber the old trick of turn­ing the image black and white in such cases, and it usu­ally won’t be that bad. To the con­trary, it gives this lovely “ana­logue” charme to the pic­ture.

I will post a few more pic­tures /​notes about back­light­ing, but like in this shot I’m a big fan of a strong light source (read: sun) peak­ing from behind the main sub­ject, pro­du­cing some light spill /​flare and, more import­antly, some a nice, defin­ing rim light.

Focal length:  50 mm Aperture: ƒ/2.0 Exposure: 1/2000 s

ISO: 1250 Lens: Minolta 50/1.4 Location:  Maynooth, Ireland

… or should I? Well, yes and no.

Sat­urday was a beau­ti­ful autumn day here on the east coast of Ire­land. As Steffi wanted to get some bak­ing and cook­ing done, I took lil’ Sophie for a walk (well, ride in her buggy). As I came up towards Car­ton Avenue and this beau­ti­ful scene opened up in front of my eyes, I star­ted kicked myself: Why did I not bring my cam­era?!

Well, I just for­got. And I decided I was too lazy to go back and get it. Instead, I grabbed my phone and tried my best to cap­ture the scene. Of course, you don’t have things like RAW cap­ture on your phone which could have eas­ily dealt with the some­what lar­ger but not too large dynamic range of the scene. I didn’t have a mod­ern enough phone to have HDR cap­ture right built into the the phone either, nor did I have an app like that installed…

So, I tried to do it manu­ally: I tried to hold the phone steady and took three pho­tos, first focus­sing (and thus tak­ing the expos­ure meas­ure­ment) at the bright­est point (the sky), then middle bright­ness (trees on the left), and lastly in the shad­ows (bot­tom right). The res­ult­ing bracket of three pho­tos (each roughly one stop apart, judging by the EXIF) was then thrown into my favour­ite free soft­ware: Image­Fuser which after some minor fid­dling with the para­met­ers pro­duced some­thing close to the above. Some more post-​processing in Pho­toshop (increase sat­ur­a­tion and con­trast, add vign­ette) and the res­ult ain’t too bad!

Only thing miss­ing: res­ol­u­tion. I guess I just have to bring a “proper” cam­era next time…

Focal length:  3.85 mm (≈37 mm) Aperture: ƒ/2.8 Exposure: 1/500 ± 1EV

ISO: 64 Camera: iPhone 3GS Location:  Maynooth, Ireland

This really should be the last nerd entry. Promise.

Up for grabs today are col­our pro­files for all my lenses (tech­nic­ally peak­ing, they are cam­era pro­files, but col­our pro­files is more to the point), both meas­ured on two dif­fer­ent cam­era bod­ies, the Sony Alpha 900 and Sony Alpha 55.

What are they for? Well, they are meant to cre­ate rather neut­ral and con­sist­ent col­ours among all the dif­fer­ent lenses (with their dif­fer­ent kinds of glas, coat­ings, etc.) in my cam­era bag. I use them all the time and they have served me very well.

All pro­files were meas­ured using a Gretag Macbeth® Color Checker® under both day light and tung­sten light, in con­junc­tion with Adobe’s free DNG Pro­file Editor. The lenses included are:

Prime lenses:	Zoom lenses:
8mm F3.5 Fisheye (Peleng)	10-​24mm F3.5 – 4.5 (Tamron)
16mm F2.8 Fisheye (Sony)	17-​35mm F2.8 – 4 (Minolta)
35mm F1.4 G (Sony)	24-​70mm F2.8 ZA SSM (Sony)
50mm F1.4 (Minolta)	70-​200mm F2.8 G SSM (Sony)
85mm F1.4 G (Minolta)	70-​300mm F4.5 – 5.6 G SSM (Sony)
100mm F2.8 Macro (Minolta)
135mm F1.8 ZA (Sony)

You can read more about installing these pro­files here. And now, for the download:

Color pro­files for the Sony A55 Down­load Down­loaded 858 times

Color pro­files for the Sony A900 Down­load Down­loaded 702 times

As always, I’d like to ask for a small dona­tion for the time and work involved in cre­at­ing these pro­files and pol­ish­ing them for pub­lic release.

Thank you!

Focal length:  50 mm Aperture: ƒ/2.8 Exposure: 1/8000 s

ISO: 200 Lens: Minolta 50/1.4 Location:  Maynooth, Ireland

Ok, one more no-​so-​artsy but rather tech­nical post.

I recently got a new cam­era, mainly to shoot video with it. How­ever, this cam­era (the Sony Alpha SLT 55) has gen­er­ated quite some stir due to its unique and some­what novel design, and apart from that, as always when there’s a new cam­era and sensor folks on for­ums have shown them­selves quite con­tro­versy about its noise per­form­ance.

To see for myself I decided to shoot this ISO series. The setup is not ideal (in hind­sight, I should have had some more darker areas in the frame too) but it should do for now. It shows a bunch of toys lit indir­ectly by rather dim light (a 40W incan­des­cent light bulb lamp shin­ing up a wall about 2m away). To give you an idea of the dimly-​ness of the shot, the EXIF reports a bright­ness value of –2.75 EV, and the ISO 800 shots for instance needed a 6s expos­ure at ƒ/​8. All pic­tures were taken from a tri­pod, from the same pos­i­tion, but at dif­fer­ent focal lengths to get identical crops, with a 2s timer and SSS off to get as sharp pic­tures as pos­sible.

The series shows the pho­tos from the α55 and the α900 right next to each other at equal ISOs, run­ning the ISO from 200 to 12800. Since the α900 only goes up to 6400 I shot an extra frame at ISO 6400 but one stop under­ex­posed and then raised the expos­ure again by one stop in post-​processing to sim­u­late ISO 12800 that way.

Speak­ing of post-​processing — all images were shot in RAW mode and then con­ver­ted with Adobe Light­Room 3 (with the 2010 pro­cess ver­sion) with zero noise reduc­tion and zero sharpen­ing applied. All other sliders were also left alone, except for the white bal­ance which was set to 2600. Then I reduced the size of the α900 pic­tures to the exact pixel dimen­sion of the α55 to make for a fair com­par­ison. In other words, all strips are taken from 16 mega­pixel images.

Phew. So much for the exper­i­mental setup. The res­ult? Well, see for your­self. But in my eyes, both cam­eras are pretty much identical in terms of noise per­form­ance, provided you take the dif­fer­ent resoult­ions into account! (That reminds me of the α900 vs Nikon D700 debate back in the day…). And, guys, it’s really not as bad as many pixel peep­ers are try­ing to make you think.

Focal length:  35 mm (≈52 mm) Aperture: ƒ/8.0 Exposure: 0.4 s

ISO: 12800 Lens: Carl Zeiss 24-70/2.8 Location:  Maynooth, Ireland

Ok, one last one more …

Here are some pro­files for the Peleng MC 8mm F3.5 Fisheye, pro­filed on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-​A900) body. For some reason, the lens, when moun­ted to my A900, is some­what decentered, that is the image circle it cre­ates is off­set a little bit to the right, and also cropped ever so slightly on the long edges.

I shot the fol­low­ing series: 5 Aper­tures [4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0, 16.0] x 1 focus dis­tance [0.40m], res­ult­ing in a total of 45 pic­tures used in the cal­ib­ra­tion pro­cess. Again, the ZIP file con­tains a two dif­fer­ent files — one that con­tains the lens pro­file and one that con­tains the DNG color pro­file to give you more accur­ate col­ours. Since this purely manual lens does not exchange any inform­a­tion with the cam­era, in order to make these pro­files work for you, I recom­mand that you manu­ally set the aper­ture for this lens. I’ll might write a post on how to do this fur­ther down the line.

 Down­load
Down­loaded 208 times

As you may know, cre­at­ing such pro­files takes a con­sid­er­able amount of time and large prints of the cal­ib­ra­tion charts as well as a col­our checker. If you find these pro­files use­ful, please con­sider a small dona­tion (con­veni­ently via PayPal):

Thank you!

For now that’ll be it (all the other lenses I use have been pro­filed by other people already) — the last lens in my series of Adobe Cam­era Raw Lens Pro­files is my favour­ite “por­trait machine”.

It’s the Min­olta AF 85mm F1.4 G fast prime, pro­filed on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-​A900) body. How­ever, this pro­file should also work well for its other Min­olta ver­sions as well as when moun­ted on an Alpha 850 body.

I shot the fol­low­ing series: 8 Aper­tures [1.4, 2.0 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0, 16.0] x 3 Focus dis­tances [0.85m, 2m, 6m], res­ult­ing in a total of almost 200 pic­tures used in the cal­ib­ra­tion pro­cess. Again, the ZIP file con­tains a bunch of dif­fer­ent files — one that con­tains all the sub pro­files in one file, as well as three sep­ar­ate files for the dif­fer­ent focus dis­tances (since you can’t select sub pro­files in Light­Room at the time of writ­ing).

And again, there’s more. As a goodie I’m also throw­ing in my DNG col­our pro­file for this lens (again, moun­ted to an A900), meas­ured both for tung­sten and day light (using a MacBeth Col­orChecker and Adobe’s DNG pro­file editor) which should give you much more accur­ate col­ours than using the default pro­files sup­plied by Adobe.

 Down­load
Down­loaded 297 times

As you may know, cre­at­ing such pro­files takes a con­sid­er­able amount of time and large prints of the cal­ib­ra­tion charts as well as a col­our checker. If you find these pro­files use­ful, please con­sider a small dona­tion (con­veni­ently via PayPal):

Thank you!