Three days at a Baby fair in Göteborg – Shooting hundreds of kids and babys climbing a mountain, at least by the looks of it. The youngest model was two weeks old and the oldest – well, I think she was in her 60s. I used Linn as my computer girl, selecting, retouching and printing pictures. My little sister Emmy as the placing and getting kid to smile person – and finally myself as the photographer, using a Canon system and a 24-70L because we needed a tethered system in order to make everything flow smoothly. (SD1?!)

We had a great time although It really annoys me not being able to use my own gear when on missions like this. I’m still happy that the Canon works as well as it does. :) Today was the the final day and when arriving home it didn’t take long before we ran out shooting a little with the SD15 – just to make sure we didn’t hurt it’s feelings! :D

Linn’s grandmother died recently and Linn wanted to send a little something from Sweden to her (our) relatives in China – and we asked my Sister Kerstin if we could make a recording of her singing “come away with me” as we just love her voice – So equipped with the Canon 5D Mark 2, the Sigma 12-24 and an iphone4 for sound (Linn’s holding it) we recorded this little video.

Lately I’ve been very busy making sure I handle my Manfrotto 303sph correct as I might have a job coming up that really needs 100% of my attention. I have the Canon 5D Mark 2 equipped with Sigma 12-24mm against my Sigma SD15 and the 8-16mm lens. I wanted to know what combo would make life easiest and as I’m not done testing, this is only a little something for you to look at – if you jump over to the Canon version, then all links are done and working – but the Sigma version only contains three rooms so don’t be angry if you find links without function.

All Canon 360′s was shot using the RAW2 mode (smaller RAW files) and developed using Lightroom 3. Sigma files has been developed using SPP. All shots done in one single row, no upper or lower shots. 8-16mm required 8 shots, while the Canon with it’s full frame and 12-24 only needed 6. Kitchen was shot using 5 bracketing frames – but I deleted the darkest where I wanted light and the brightest at the window area – so it looks weird. :)

Images taken by two Chinese photographers using Canon and Fujifilm cameras in jpg mode. I tried my very best to enhance in LR3 but there wasn’t enough data really. Although we got lots of good memories!

Starts with relatives gathering – us dressing up and here we are ready to show humbleness and respect to the oldest, Linns grandmother  by bowing three times. Feels very vey strange but she looked very happy so.. :)

Then it’s time for me to serve green tee to the “head” relatives of the family. Here I serve Linn’s (and mine according to Chinese traditions) mom. I enjoyed this part much more. :)

After serving all of them the tee, Linn’s grand mother gives us two red envelopes with money. That means that she accepts our marriage. She’s 86 btw and a really tough lady. :)

After the ceremony I carry Linn down many stairs and to the awaiting car, a BMW X5 limited edition.. :) Some friend lend it to us, and we had it decorated China style.

We drove first to a park by the huge erha lake, and there the wedding photos bagan.

The park was fun, and lots of people were looking. :) I had to say Hello quite a few times.

After the park thingi it was time to go to the Hotell, a huge five star thing that was prepared for us. We stood at the entrence of the hotell giving candy and cigaretts to the guests and shaking hands. Mom and dad was standing there with us. The strange thing here was that lots of guests didn’t come for us, they came because of Linn’s father and they didn’t even look at me, walking straight to dad and congratulating.. hmm.. China.

Then when all 300 guests was seated, eating and stuff we came in walking to the front were a rental talk person stood doing the smooth introduction of our love (she had no idea who we were so this felt strange too) and she walked us thru some decorating steps, like cutting a small cake, pouring champagne on a pile of wine glas and finally to have the traditional drink with our armes around each other. hmm.. I got some shot of that but perhaps you understand.

We then walked from table to table, my bestman told eveyone to stand up and then someone at each table said something nice about the future of ours and then we drank.. :) I had water and they had rice wine. Most didn’t know but after 30 tables, rice wine would likely had me killed.

Now this is written in haste and I’m sure my English is worse then usual. But at least you got a taste of Weddings in this part of China.

Shot taken with the 24-70 2.8L on the 5D Mark 2.. This type of ‘cut out’ feeling is hard to achieve without a big sensor. All images processed using ACR CS5. Please Sigma, make something big in the future. :) Full size.

And some more from the same day..

And a last one of me, taken by Linn.

Developed using Lightroom 3 Beta 2 – Original size – Original RAW

Developed using Capture One 5.1.1 (noise red, off)  - Original size – Original RAW

Canon 5D Mark 2 shot taken with the very good 100-400 IS and now, after some debating with myself, I tried more developers to see what would give the very best feeling for this shot. I used two developers that I think people use and you have them above. The RAW is also available if you want to try your way. Please leave your result as a comment. Now, Sigma. Please bring that SD15, or perhaps even that SD16 too? Look how bored I am. :)

320mm f5,6 ISO100 1/320s

[Update: There is a second test in the comments section in this article]

Alright, let me put it like this, today I was going to test how the Canon 100-400 4,5-5,6 IS compared to Sigma 50-500 4,5-6,3 OS and I was a bit afraid of testing these two cameras against each other because the 5D has 21MP and I got 4.6MP. There’s a slight difference. :)

First image has been shot using ISO200 on both cameras, Sigma at F7,1 and Canon at F6,3 .

I used Lightroom 3 beta 2 for Canon and Sigma Photo Pro 4 for the Sigma.

Original Canon 100-400 IS has a VERY sweet bokeh! Yummy! (right shot)

Original

Original (here I pushed sharpening on the Canon version, and some to the Sigma shot as well. +0.3) You can see how much more detail the Canon has – but my Sigma is not too afraid of the fight.. :)  Looking at this shot I get the feeling that Canon’s 100-400 has the edge in terms of sharpness but that said, it’s not easy to see without those extra pixels. mmm

Second shot: Sigma at ISo50, Canon at ISO100. I tried to make WB as similar as I could. Wasn’t that easy. Canons bigger sensor gives a nice blur to the background.

Original

Original I took quite a few shots and none of them from the Canon came out very sharp. I’ll redo this another day. Or is this how it’s supposed to be?

Original Difference here is quite small. In order to take the Sigma shot, I walked away 5-8m to make background blur more. Didn’t help much.

So, don’t make hasty conclusions about this test. Having better optics on both in controlled situations the 5D would probably win by a wider margin. I think.

Part 2 (before in the comment section but due to problems with WordPress I put it here so that you can see these pictures)
Next test! Now I switched lens to 120-300, left Sigma, right Canon. Sigma shot at f5,6 @ 120mm. Canon 100-400 IS shot at F9 @ 100mm. I will have to do a third test. :) And I found Canon 24-70 2.8L lens isn’t sharp enough for these tests.. I wonder if the 24mm TS is better? Anyhow, the 100-400 lens from Canon looks very good, all the way from 100-400mm – it degrades slightly at 400mm but the Sigma 50-500 degrades much more, especially at corners. Will come back to this.







This one shows how sharp the 50mm 1.4 Sigma is. I tried to use it for above comparison against 24-70mm 2.8 L but failed to frame it correctly.

It fits perfectly to have a post about my Canon 5D experience after my article from yesterday don’t you think? :D Anyways. Every wednesday evening I have open photography classes in a near by high school and this time I brought the Canon 5D Mark 2 with me – much because it’s still dark at this time of the year and indoor light isn’t perfect for any of my current Sigmas. So I went coupled with a 24-70mm and my Elinchrom Quadra. (Quadra is only used when I say so, or you see it).

OBS. None of these images will hurt your eyes. I promise! :D

And we’re not the only ones on school at this late hour. ISO 3200 on photos above, below is ISO2500. Pretty impressive if you consider the really really bad light in that room. All images in this post are available in it’s full size, some cropped some not. All images has been developed using the latest version of Capture One.

What I really enjoyed was how well the Canon 24-70mm 2.8L lens worked. Focus was ok even in bad light – it failed from time to time but only in situations where I would understand. :)

Above is a shot taken with the 50mm 1.8 lens at 1.8 and ISO2000. (second image is a crop of the first one). Lens itself has a very cheap feel to it, made of cheap plastic and cost very little but its optical performance is nothing but cheap! So I took it for a ride into the rainy outdoors and created a nice little setup using my Quadra and an umbrella.

Canon 50mm 1.8 @ 2.5. The girl above is a heavy metal drummer. She’s really good too but it’s really hard to imagine her banging those drums when you talk to her. :)

It’s sooo easy to blow those highlights (see sky?!), I have a feeling that I got at least two stops more on any of my Sigmas. Also, so many colors has been lost, and most of these shots has been developed using more or less zero color noise reduction in order to get as far as possible away from that nutella look that we all hate so much.. (don’t we?!) – but, even with color noise reduction set at zero, lots of colors has been lost. Her zipper has this strong yellowish metallic color on one side, but lost on the other. I tried hard to make it visible but it just wouldn’t. (the raw file itself DO contain some  yellow information in the zipper but developer just wasn’t able to pull it through). The three layered Sigma would show everything, especially at this low ISO. (320)

But the 50mm 1.8 is really nice!

Above shot of me has been taken by Nils.

How about trying the Quadra indoor?

It’s always tricky to have such enormous difference between colors in a shot, and that makes it difficult to process. ISO640. I’m thinking about getting myself some gel’s or something and experiment with temperatures.

Now, over to really low ISO, 3200 to 25600. They don’t look really good in color so most of them has been processed as black and white. Some lit only by the flash on mobile phones. :)

Above is ISO25600, the rest has mostly been shot using ISO5000.

Above is a ISO3200 shot and as light my students helped me with their mobile phones! :D Jaij.

 

Photo taken by Martin Carlsson using a Canon 5D Mark2

Me and my friend Martin Carlsson had one of our nerdy meetings yesterday. We didn’t have a real plan, more then go out for a session but weather was really as dull as it gets and none of us felt really happy about it so Martin came up with this truly excellent idea to try out some extreme macro using the reversed lens technique.

I thought the idea was brilliant, especially in mind that I had my trusty 70mm macro that probably would become like a microscope and what if I turned my 120-300 bigma around? Would that make me see atoms for real? I was pretty sure I would so we made a setup with my Quadra, a bunch of lenses and a VISA card. Mostly because people know what it looks like.

Now, here’s a shot with the Sigma 70mm Macro NOT reversed. You get pretty close by doing nothing, just using it as it’s supposed to be used. This is as close as you get. (and don’t you dare try using those numbers!!!)

Now I reversed it but to my surprise nothing much happened. I didn’t get any closer. hmm. I ran out getting myself a bigger gun. My 70-200mm 2.8 lens. I swong it around and it gave me less then the 70mm, at least at 200m. 70mm looked closer. So I figured that my assumption of more mm was wrong. So I got myself my 17-70. At least I could try and see if wider meant closer.

Sure enough, soon I was traveling over the VISA cards surface and maan was it a beauty. I never thought a piece of plastic could look this beautiful. Close to the same feeling looking at Avatar in 3D for the first time. :D

So if 17mm meant closer what was my next step? The 12-24 (which Martin now tried in the background) was a bit tricky because of the round frontal lens. But I did have something even wider – my 10-20!

Now, the 17mm was difficult enough to control. Every breath and dare I say heart beat effected my steadiness greatly and things didn’t get easier with the 10-20 at 10mm. It was really tricky, to give you a feeling for how shallow depth of field is I tried to catch the top of one of those small letters on the card.. See how background fades away! Nice bokeh too! :D

It was EASY to miss, either you got the top, bottom or just a big blur. All depending on who touched the table or walked the floor or if a big bird flew outside my window.

Now, what’s next? All above shots has been taken wide open. I had no idea how to change aperture on a lens that wasn’t mounted but Martin had an idea. By changing the Aperture while mounted he then pressed the “aperture test button” and while holding the button he gently released the lens and oala – aperture was still at wanted f-stop! Now things got even more interesting!

How about Linns face at f8 – f32?

Or why not some fine salt? (not sea salt or anything huge like that)

Or the landscape of a swedish 20kr bill? And yes, the black part of the image was me not holding the reversed lens perfectly aligned. It wasn’t that easy!

And finally Martin started staring into a good old light bulb – as if the quadras flashes and strong LED wasn’t enough disturbing. I’m pretty sure Martin took some better shots with his 5D but here’s my only sharp one. Or at least, a bit sharp. Lamp never stood really still and it was terribly hard to take a decent shot.

But I got pretty close! :)

Alright, if you have your own shots to share, then please do! (it’s easy to do when you post a comment).

Alright, it looks like I’m more or less in panic mode here but that’s true. ;) I made so many edits, took scenes away and this and that – and after each time I processed the movie and was ready to upload – there was something that I wasn’t satisfied with. I have five different versions of the same movie with four different “pre talks” and finally I settled for this one. It has the worst beginning but hey, it’s me. :D – still it’s a bit long. It’s also supposed to be fun for my sister and her family to watch. :)

Download the original output from Final Cut – 1280×720 – less compressed than youtube version and more smooth in playback.

So how do I like the 5D Mark II compared to what I’m used too? Well, first of all – it’s a great tool! It’s easy to work with even if I’m missing some buttons – as a movie camera it’s great! After a day or two you feel that you have it all under more or less control and you can start to relax. It’s such a nice feeling to be able to go up to ISO6400 (or even higher) and still feel OK – and in really bad light too!

But, as a still camera even in good light I don’t like the output as much. I can’t get “that” from it – and I’m not that impressed with the 21mp resolution. Strange feeling zooming in to these large files and feel like like there should be more. Never feel perfectly satisfied. Oh well. The burden we three layer lovers have to bare.

But when light is bad, and ISO goes up then it leaves my Sigmas in the dust – you can take brilliant shots in ISO3200 (didn’t try much higher, only with video) and I always felt secure without extra light or the need of a flash. So would I like to own one myself? For sure! I can easily imagine myself doing weddings filming and taking pictures at the same time. At least try. :) Especially inside church where I today feel a bit bound by Sigmas bad light performance. But why is Canons shutter so loud?? aaaaa

Much can be said about the specs of each of these beasts – but nothing for me more interesting than the possibility to grab stunning video or perhaps I should say film – it’s far from “video” in my book. Myself has been waiting now since forever for Red to release the Scarlet but it seams to be delayed – and the biggest difference I think between these two new players is RAW footage. And that’s probably also why I will wait a bit more before jumping on. I think I have a movie director inside that wants to come out. That said, I’ll continue to use Foveon equipped products.

Canon 1D Mark IV video example by Vincent Laforet..
If you can’t play, go here to his smugmug page or his blog.

Nikon D3s video example Video example from Vincent Munier..

Impressive, isn’t it? Consider that both these cams can go all the way up to ISO102400, which is really insane! Compared to RAW footage possible with a RED, above shots still looks good but somewhat video. Did you notice how Canon footage look Canon? A special brownish tone to skin and enviroment that’s always there in low lit situations. Still impressive. :)

Red one footage: Right click and save as!
(HD720, h264 around 500MB size, but well worth looking at) – Oh, the Mysterious-X is on it’s way too – the next generation sensor from RED that will be even more impressive. Starting at a clean ISO800. You surely need lots of ND’s to do outdoor footage with any depth. You can follow some of that here.

Now, looking at all these mighty riders in shiny armor – when do we see the Foveon sensor do film? (except DP) It would probably not be able to go as high ISO wise but colors and definition will surely be in another league. Especially if it will be able to record in some type of RAW format. Should be possible if you consider what RED team has been able to do.

I still enjoy the possibilities provided by the DP1 and DP2 – and it shows that it’s possible. But still, resolution is way too low. :(

Sigma DP1 – my Sigma AML-1 lens adapter review (sorry, nothing new to share).