Friday, 11 January 2013

The Sigma Interchangeable Camera Solution


First off a "hands-on" with the DP3 Merrill by Chris Gampat of the PhoBlographer, who had the good grace to change his mind on the camera.

Second, a 100% blow-up from a picture I took the other day. However this no ordinary 100% blowup, this is from an upsized file. Upsized to the same size as a Nikon D800E image. i.e. 36MP. (4907 x 7360 pixels - 103 MB)


This was created in the following way - From Raw > Sigma Photo Pro > Tiff > Converted to .dng file in Photoshop CS6 > Processed in ACR. This has now become my way of processing the Sigma files. I have a preset in Sigma Photo Pro that I now use for all my DP2M files. I pull up the shadows and tone down the highlights and thats pretty much it. No sharpening whatsoever at any point in the process of course. I am also storing the files long-term as .dng files. I'm not keeping the original Sigma raw files. This may of course mean I don't get the benefit of updates to the Sigma software but this produces amazing looking files, gives me much more flexibility and integrates with my workflow much better. 

Consequently I have decided to go with the interchangeable three camera / lens solution in that I'm going to buy all three DPM cameras, though with Sigmas tardiness at getting these into stores, when I can buy the 50mm version, who knows. I have however ordered the DP1 Merrill with the 19mm lens. I decided I can't really get anything better in such a light small package and carrying three cameras around won't really be a hardship. What this means for what else I keep, I don't know yet, but the DP2M gives me absolutely what I'm looking to produce with a camera so it seems crazy NOT to give this a try. 


N.B. to see more on the cameras and lenses featured in this post click on the relevant labels (tags and keywords) below.

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