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After seeing the first images online from the Sigma DP1, I decided I had to at least try it out as a substitute for the film Leica. It’s a landmark camera, being the first APS-C sensor in a compact form. The Foveon chip makes it interesting, but I’d rather have the sensor from my D300 in this form factor. The f/4 lens makes light gathering capability less than ideal. The need for yet another RAW workflow really had me doubting whether I should even bother. In the end, a small, sealed APS-C sensor package was something I couldn’t pass up. None of the compact cameras I’ve tried up until now seemed to be substitutes for the DSLR or Leica/film tools.

This is one of the first images I captured with the camera. It’s an in camera generated JPEG with the flat default settings from the factory.

So far, I like the controls as speed is adequate for my purposes. The LCD suffers by comparison to the D300’s bright, high rez LCD.

I think that once I get the Sigma software loaded and work in some better light I should be able to better take the measure of the camera as a tool for my work.

I was relieved to browse the Aperture library and see that the vast majority of images that I’ve captured fit into the SIgma DP1 parameters: ISO 800 or less and F/4 or smaller apertures. With the D300 and its Auto ISO, I’ve captures quite a few outside of it- ISO 1600 at f/2.8. So while I’d rather have the D300 sensor and 24mm 2.8 in a compact package, I’ll give up 2 stops and continue to consider the DP1 sensor with an f/4 lens.

On the other hand, I suspect that the DP1 doesn’t beat a Leica plus Summicron. My f/2.0 lenses give me 2 stops over the f/4 of a Sigma DP1 and my ISO film is just a stop slower than the ISO 800 of the DP1.

Consultation on Rue Huber, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is a reworking of one of my favorite street photos. Here’s the previous version from last Febuary posted to Flickr

It’s almost embarassing to put these two version up against each other, but I’m very pleased to see the progress I’ve made in creating memorable images. Importantly to me, I can see the same idea working in the previous version, I’ve just done a much better job of correcting the color and performing local brightness and contrast to tell a story and guide the reading of the image.

There are two factors at work. One is better tools. Thanks to my internet and book instructors like Thom Hogan and Vincent Versace,  I’m using Capture NX and Nik Color Efex in PS to post process. The improved white balance is due to the NX RAW conversion and neutral point tools. The enhanced lighting is from Nik Efex.

The second factor is a more conscious approach to bringing out the light in the photo. The buildings and sky in the background all share the same tone level now with the figures being emphasized in relation. The maps are now at full white with the faces brought up to a similar level, placing the figures in the darker background.

And I thought I used to be pretty good at this. I hope that in a year I’ll have the chance to rework this image again and once again be embarrassed by past efforts.

As I work through some of these Tri-X images from San Francisco, I find that the tools used deeply affect the images captured. These are simple, graphic somewhat grainy and low resolution images. I like these simple, almost mysterious black and white images, but their scale and ambition seems smaller than the clean, high resolution DSLR images which seem, by comparison, to be like medium format captures.

To the extent that I want to range widely over my visual vocabulary, it would seem I need to mix up the tools. Film, digital, rangefinder, DSLR.

Technical note on the image: The right side of the hydrant was blown out, or at least the negative was too dense to pick up texture with the Minolta Scan Dual III that I use. I recovered by adding texture lifted from another area of the image. It’s nice to be able to so simply save an area with “real pixels”.

I finally retrieved three rolls of Tri-X from a local lab which were shot back in December on a buisness trip to San Francisco. I had the lab (Techlab) here in Baltimore scan them, but the scans are unusable. Many blown out and most full of dust. My usual lab for film, National Photo does a vastly superior job on develop and scan, but they don’t run Tri-X, so I needed an alternative.

The scanning wouldn’t be so bad, but my VueScan/Minolta Dimage III set up is being cranky, with random crashes of VueScan and one crash of the entire system.

Given my experience of traveling with the D300 last month, I’m not eager to keep on trying to use film and scan as much as I like the look of the images. I’d rather drag the D300 and convert from color.

Now that the Sigma DP1 is getting close to release and some images are being posted to the web, there’s the possibility of a larger sensor digital camera for travel to replace the Leica/film setup.

With the release of Aperture 2.0, I can finally put Aperture back into my workflow. In it’s absence, I’ve gotten used to the RAW -> Capture NX -> TIFF -> Photoshop -> PSD -> JPEG -> Flickr workflow. I’ve put Aperture back in at the front (receiving and cataloging the RAWs) and at the back (importing back the final, flat PSD from Photoshop). That leaves me with an external folder set of work files from Capture NX and Photoshop. It should actually help keep things orderly and the Aperture library file size down.

It’s nice to be back with a few hundred images to work through. I need to remind myself to get out and continue to get the Suburban images when the light is right. Tomorrow looks like a good bet, with relatively warm temperatures and sun in the afternoon.

In the mean time, I’m developing this theme of motion in the black and white urban travel series. I’m working on gesture here mostly.

My way of working has been to load images into Aperture for scanning, rating and cataloging, then going to the rated photos to choose one for post processing. It gets exported, opened in Capture NX and optimized as a Color NEF. Then exported as a TIFF and opened in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, I try a few approaches, but leave it full screen on the big monitor unmanipulated until the next day. By then I generally have picked a firm direction to take the image.

After assessing a solid year’s work of building a portfolio, I decided that I was evolving two bodies of work: a color series documenting the Suburban Landscape and a black and white series documenting my urban travel. It was clear that some photography didn’t fit, as it was to document family or vacation.

When I brought the D300 on my long business trip I knew that I was inviting crossover images by switching tools. When the Leica M6 with C41 process black and white film came on a trip, I had no option for doing color studies. But since I’ve been so happy with the utility of the Nikon D300, I brought it and just the 24mm and 50mm lenses, as if I had the minimal Leica kit.

When I shot this image, I recall thinking “red scooter, red trashbag”. I was creating a color study, something I would not have done with the usual travel setup. It turned out to be a striking image, fitting in more with the light and color aspects of the Suburban Landscape project.

I’ll call it a travel photo in the style of my Suburban Studies and continue to create monochrome conversions from the bulk of the urban images where form, not color, is dominant.

I had been in Europe for almost a week before I saw my first sunny day.

FInally, with the release of Aperture 2.0, I can catalog and scan the D300 images easily. So far the new release seems stable and reasonably more capable. There are a few raw decoding glitches, but mostly the D300 images are appropriately rendered.

However my experience with Capture NX and the in camera settings of the D300 will probably reduce my use of Aperture post processing. In a scenic landscape like this, I can very quickly create an image with some snap. But the saturation and D-Lighting effects that I get with Capture NX in combination with the local control of the Efex filters within Photoshop will generally limit Aperture to cataloging and quick conversions- like this one.

Another image from Amsterdam. Again with the D300 and 24mm f/2.8. As I expected, the combination was not really much heavier or bulkier than the Leica with the 35mm Summicron, providing the same field of view, but a stop slower. With ISO 800 on the D300 being cleaner than the ISO 400 (or ISO 320) film in the Leica, speed is no different between the two systems.

By continuing to convert to Black and White by policy for these travel images, I have greater control of rendering by converting to black and white in Photoshop. So the Leica has lost it’s prime role as a travel camera to the D300 on the basis of image quality.