The following photos are all available as full size.
I’m back with more shots from Yunnan, Dali – I really enjoy my stay so far and my DP’s hasn’t run out of juice once yet. I have one spare battery for each and I charge every night. I film quite a lot too, will show later when it’s time. One thing is extremely annoying and that’s when I switch between the two use interface is slightly different so I often press the wrong buttons which has killed some good moments, perhaps there should be some option to make the DP2 mimic the DP1.. :)
As some of you know I had problems with my CS3 installation so I installed Lightroom 2.4 instead, so this time I have a wide mix between LR developed shots and SPP 3.3 developed shots (saved as TIFF from SPP and imported into LR for my little watermark and some post adjustments such as vigneting. Often none). Can you see what is what?
Jaij! I made it again! Another post. woohooo.. Alright, this time I included some of those cool skies from a couple of days ago, they’re in the end of this post. Also another note to all these shots. Some of them has two different developments put together from the same raw. One for sky and another for the rest. Also, one or two has two different exposures and what I did was dead simple, I just made a fuzzy cut out from one shot to the other to get some more DR. Sky behind pigs and the dirty work black and white with a truck and a man. Open them up full and you’ll see what I mean. I don’t have a tripod with me so everything you see is hand held. Developed using SPP 3.3 for everything.
The above and below lady is 92 years old and we visited her because she didn’t have many days left of this life and they wanted some pictures of her. I so much love to look at old peoples faces, listed to their voices and just imagine what life was back then.
Above: Using my sunglasses with some green fading cheap thing to bring sky for you to see.. very powerful – Lucky for us it stayed mountain side.
Below: This is acually shot at F14 using DP2. I cropped out some, the oof is very nice don’t you think? And woaa how sharp these lenses can be. DP1 is probably slightly sharper but Dp2 has slightly better bokeh. :) Above: A really fast two shot sky magic thingi. Don’t look too close at the right side if the picture as it’s not a perfect match. I was shaking a little or something. Sat on a double seat bike at the moment (those bikes are so much fun!).
Below the below shot and the below shot: Cool with all these old style trucks! Not so cool with environment in mind. Also x3 fill light is used for many of these shots. Above: Spiders!!! These are BIG things, totally dangerous for flies and stuff. :) And they come in massive amounts, I don’t like spiders too close to me..
Below: Sky is double exposed. Copied with fluffy border to fit nicely. I moved too much between shots so it’s a bit dirty. But works. Above and below: Would you mind being here?
Below: Some of those shots from a couple of days ago. We went up for 276 stairs and enjoyed the view. If you open up some of the portrait shots you’ll find lots of dragon flies. There was literally thousands of them, especially higher up. They said it was because of rain coming. Pretty big too.. Above: Dragonflies!! See this shot even bigger, or you can’t really see any of those flying thingis.. Above: Lastly, a special breed of dog from Tibet, once made to protect tibetans from Tigers and other predators. This one is about a year old and will become much bigger. It’s nothing you really wanna play around with even if it looks like a family dog.
Hi again, now I developed some more from last days. I took some today that I hopefully can post tomorrow of the lake here. Very dramatic weather these days. Oh, and we’re on 2000m elevation (height?) and mountains around are just below 3000m. Very cool environment. :) And these are developed using none calibrated screens. I checked on some other computers and it looked ok. Mixed DP1 and DP2 shots, click each for bigger and with info regarding DP and ISO. Exif should be there too.
Something you drink always, tea! Like in Britain only it comes in more visible form. Often they have some herbs inside that they call medicine and doctor told them to drink. When eating you always get green tea to the food, lots of people carry a tea thingi with them at all times such as these below.
I was teasing Linn telling her that modern China used VC machines to cut all those fancy patterns and images they have everywhere in windows and chairs and stuff. How wrong I was. Lots of those are man made. I walked on a street with a huge amount of smaller companies with people making really really beautiful stuff such as these below. Light was worse than I though so ISO should have been higher for better sharpness. My fault.
Pictures below are from Dali ancient city. Very cool place.
Above shot isn’t ISO400 as image says. It’s 100. Too fast work. Linn is waiting for the computer. ;) She wanna develop her shots now. aaaaaaa
Food, what can I say? Chinese cooking is just from another planet and something to die for. A restaurant often looks something like this and you point your finger on whatever vegetable, meat or mushroom or whatever is visible and they’ll tell you one or two ways to cook it – you select one and oala you have your dish. So if you point a tomato they will most likely make a tomato egg mix that is very nice.
I went with friends to some different restaurant these days and I took some shots to show you what it looks like with many dishes on a table. And I’ll ask Linn to fill in some short info on what’s being served but in short it’s donkey, pork, water living vegetable, beans etc etc – even grasshopper (but not on any of these shots) and the candle is not there to be nice – but to keep flies away.
Developed on uncalibrated equipment, tried to make sure they looked ok using histogram. Not that easy with colors. Oh well. Will update with some text later but now I’m off to that hot spring to swim. Big thing with Linn’s relatives etc. They have high hopes for my swimming style. haha.
Oh and under each picture you see if it’s DP1 or DP2. Most is DP1 as it’s wider and suites my photography style a bit better.
Human power. Or the power of humans. It’s quite amazing how some of these people work and you can’t really see it on this shot but if I wanted to take a picture of him he would most likely give me a big smile and treat me a cigarett (which I would have to decline). And no, I’m not talking about any of the guys sitting there..
I have shoe size 46 in European size, that’s extremely uncommon in China and maybe if I lived in Beijing (Northern Chinese are often bigger, they say it comes from them eating less rice and more bread) I could find something but down here in the south it’s nearly impossible. So above is a shoe maker that I ordered sandals from. I had to paint what I wanted it to look like and everything. The bottom layer is made from an old car tire too. How cool isn’t that? Well. In another week or so I’ll know the result. And price? He was a bit on the expensive side. 60RMB
Above lady has Bai minority clothes on, the same minority that Linn comes from.
No money to read the local newspaper? No problem! :)
Jeff Sickels, the creater of Sigma X3F quicklook plugin has once more shown his skill and released a welcome update. He made this comment a while back:
There’s a new version of the X3F_qlgenerator out that now uses x3f_extract. It handles the DP1 X3F files significantly better than earlier versions (a plus), and keeps the same orientation enhancements from v1.2. Thanks to Carl’s RAW DP2 Pack, I was also able to verify that Quicklook handles the DP2 files rather well (now I just have to get my hands on a DP2). Enjoy.
Getting bored of myself, decided to take a look at what I forgot to post. Some has been posted but some was forgotten. So here we go. :D A year with the SD14 and DP1. And to make this post super honest I only used Sigma Photo Pro, no Photoshop at all. So this is what you could do without magic wands and plugins.. :P
There is a house close to where I live, it’s a house where people live that haven’t got the best out of life. I go there a couple of times every week and I almost never bring my camera – mostly because I don’t want them to think I’m there for the shot. But this Monday I brought the DP1 (I so much love it’s size!) and I under exposed ISO800 to get better shutter speeds. (light was dim).
DP1 using ISO1600 – 3200 monochrome white balance. Pushed.
SD14 10-20mm. Handheld.
DP1 handheld. This one came out fantastic. :D
The only SD14 image is the one with the wooden fence or whatever it’s called. With the house. :) Black and whites are ISO1600+ shots taken with the Dp1. Last one is DP1, vignette created by me always. Lens isn’t that bad. ;)
Just went to visit Björn, a friend living on the edge of sociaty, life hasn’t been too good for him but we do have a great time together talking photography during an occasion fika. (Fika is Swedish for coffee type of brake). This room was very bad lit, and the shutter speed was outstandingly poor – but pushing is fun and DP1 did once more make it a moment to remember.
Marry Christmas to you all! And think about those who has less then you. :) They need a smile and if possible a hug.
Pushing the DP1 to ISO3200 is easy and very very needed sometimes. Adding the Monochrome WB in SPP is great and the noise is to my eye very beautiful. You can in some pictures see a slight banding (when light is really really bad such as yellow indoor light bulbs etc) but nothing I would worry about. I wish that I could use Raw Developer but at the moment is a no go so I’ll have to wait some more. :´(
I have done a test series with some ISO3200 situational shots. Real life, real needed type of shots (shutter speed around 1/10 – 1/30 at low F numbers) . I’d like to know where your limit and preferred preference between sharpness and detail goes. Or if you have any other way to deal with this. I will not give you my RAW this time, but you’ll have these at all settings at full size good quality JPEG’s to play with.
Six copies of the same image: A First: Straight out of SPP. Pushed to ISO3200 | A2 Curved (Photoshop) B Second: Sharpness -1.0 in SPP. | B2 Curved PS C Third: Sharpness -2.0 in SPP. | C2 Curved PS
Pushing revisited.. Someone might remember my High ISO post prior to the release of the DP1 – and now it’s time for a follow up. Setting the DP1 to ISO800 and underexpose about two steps brings your much better shutter speeds and a very dark image as a result. Pushing it upwards again in SPP or Lightroom brings the picture back to life, although a bit noisier. Here’s six examples. They are all except the car shot done when higher ISO really was badly needed. Only option would have been to turn on the flash. (speed ranging between 1/10s – 1/30s). I did add a lot of vignetting.
To get the best results: (without extras)
Lightroom2: No sharpening. almost full noise reduction. Monochrome WB (set using SPP). SPP: Sharpening between -1.0 and 2.0 depening on taste. Add shadow ca -0.6. You need some PS in order to get a good feeling. Use Curve and darken shadows some more. See next post on this.
Did I tell you I LOVE my DP1? :D (I don’t love everything about it, but I do forgive when playing with the RAW). These images are all taken with one light. One big softbox with a not well known branded flash so it’s probably a setup that everyone could afford. These images are all available as full size for pixel-peepers out there They are as sharp as they look all the way down to 100% and will look terribly good printed. Better so of printed big! Please do try! :) (go to my flickr account for more images from the same series).
Workflow is terribly simple. Sigma Photo Pro, save as TIFF 16, post process using Aperture or Lightroom. I did use Lightroom 2 only for the BW below.
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