NO pixels

I came to realization that the same exact shots presented as photos would be something completely different. There are frames in this video that I would have considered my very best macro shots if they were taken as stills. A video however needs to have a story and a flow. A bunch of very different unrelated shots put together as video doesn’t really work but as photos can create an interesting collection. Here it is, second part of my macro explorations (part 1 available here):

most first half of the video is shot @50Mbit that I thought was enough for my purposes. The second half is shot @100Mbit! The difference is huge! I’m surprised that my hacked GH1 has no problems with such high bit rate.


here is my “professional” setup with pink dolly, and lots of sticky tape

At the time I write this none of the Adobe products can properly read SD15 raw files. Luckily they support DP1s which is more or less the same hardware (AFE etc). With a fair bit of help from Roland and Arvo I came up with a way to convert SD15 files to a special DP1s format. By “special” I mean modified in a way that preserves highlights and gives good results in ACR. Most likely SPP will not read it properly. The current solution is set up for the daylight white balance (or similar).

here is a package that contains all you need:
http://nopixels.net/uploads/SD15_LR_hack.zip
you can use it to convert a single file or a whole folder:

>SD15_process_single.bat "c:\path\to\file\SDIM0343.X3F"
>SD15_process_folder.bat "c:\path\to_folder"

Files converted that way have a whole bunch of information missing (like lens, iso etc) as I primarily focused on getting the image part working. I might fix it one day but I just hope that meantime we get proper support from Adobe and this is only intermediate solution.

I also built a profile based on converted file (using Macbeth chart and Adobe DNG Profile Editor). With the above method I only update RAW data and the color transformation matrices in the file are left from DP1s. They are close as the hardware is very similar but not exactly the same. The profile makes sure that all the colors are spot on.

here is the profile created for my SD15:
http://nopixels.net/uploads/SIGMA DP1S sd15 hack 002.dcp

and examples (left SD15 in lightroom, right hacked and profiled SD15 in lightroom):

More samples and history of this workflow:
http://nopixels.net/sd15-struggle
disclaimer:
While I make every effort to deliver high quality products, I do not guarantee that my products are free from defects. My software is provided “as is,” and you use the software at your own risk.

These exclusions and limitations may not apply in all jurisdictions. You may have additional rights and some of these limitations may not apply to you.

I’m more and more impressed with that little puppy. 1080p 60p looks just stunning. here is small web version:

that square bokeh it amazing!

720p available for download here

This CMOS sensor is almost as beautiful as SD14 one. Why companies insist on using CCDs? just because they are cheaper to make?

After the initial success of test macro shots on our new toy we went exploring the garden again. This time I was equipped with my Sigma:
(click photo for more)

A few amazing macro shots took by my son Patryk. Every time he takes a camera into his hands he puts my photos to shame:

The funny bit is that he took the pictures with a VIDEO camera. It never even crossed my mind to take stills with it, I got my SLR for that purpose, right? To my surprise this little video camera is more than capable of taking beautiful pictures. The quality of lighting and color is just spectacular.