Sigma Looking for a starting point

rybolt

Itinerant picture taker
Location
Yellow Springs, Ohio USA
Name
Paul Rybolt
I'm a new Merrill owner. In fact, I won't even have them (DP1M and DP3M) until tomorrow.
I have a short shooting session the day after I get them at the National Museum of the US Air Force. I think I'd like to take the Sigmas along and shoot some pictures after I finish with my project using the Fuji X Pro cameras and lenses.
My question is this, I can use the Fuji cameras to asa's as high as 1600 and get acceptable results. I know that asa 400 is pretty close to the top end for acceptable color images with the Merrill cameras. My thought is to stick to a top asa of 200, use a tripod and go to whatever shutter speed I need. I'm in a very dark place (a very very large airplane hangar) and I'm going to need to shoot at f8-11. How are the results with these sensors at very long shutter speeds? I know I'm not going to get any reciprocity failure (ooh. I'm old!) but does the camera still work well with long exposures. I'm probably going to meter manually, possibly with a Sekonic L508 meter.
Here's an example of the type of light I'm working with.
PRP12475-Edit-X3.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)


Thanks for any pointers to get me started.
 
Here are a colour and b&w 30 sec exposure. I know its not the light you will working in . But its still the longest exposure you will get from a Merrill.
I"ve not done any night shots yet.

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Very Cool! Thanks for doing this. My original thought was to discard the idea of doing color and boost the asa up higher but after seeing what you got in color with a 30 second exposure I'm going to re-think my plan.
From looking at both sets of pictures it looks like the dynamic range doesn't suffer too much from the poor light. I'm not a pixel peeper and I don't do HDR stuff but I'm not above using LR or CS6 to help an image if it's called for.
 
That's beautiful Ray - where is that?

Thanks Colin. It's from a place we were renting in Positano, on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, just south of Sorrento (the other side of the little Peninsula that Sorrento is located on the north side of). We were incredibly fortunate to spend a month in the area last summer, two weeks in Praiano and two weeks in Positano. Holiday of a lifetime. We saw the area about four years earlier, but only for a day or two, and we told ourselves then that THIS was a place we needed to come back to and spend some real time. After four years of saving up, we did it. I hope to get back again someday - it's just an incredibly beautiful area.

I sort of kept a travelogue during the trip in this long thread - I went back and fixed and removed a few broken links that were in it. Anyway, if interested, it's just as pretty in daylight:

Featured Forum Thread: "Greetings from Italy" by Ray Sachs

-Ray
 
Of all the camera images I see the Merrill seem to offer the most

Its a long way off & I'll never have the option to buy all 3 or even have all 3 with me
so which is the best to choose?
I like wide angle landscape but also like portraiture> I don't like too much distortion with wide angle. I use a zoom but normally about 120max is sufficient so crops could be considered

How good is stiching with the DP2 ? = panorama shot in vertical portrait mode??
 
Thanks Colin. It's from a place we were renting in Positano, on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, just south of Sorrento (the other side of the little Peninsula that Sorrento is located on the north side of). We were incredibly fortunate to spend a month in the area last summer, two weeks in Praiano and two weeks in Positano. Holiday of a lifetime. We saw the area about four years earlier, but only for a day or two, and we told ourselves then that THIS was a place we needed to come back to and spend some real time. After four years of saving up, we did it. I hope to get back again someday - it's just an incredibly beautiful area.

I sort of kept a travelogue during the trip in this long thread - I went back and fixed and removed a few broken links that were in it. Anyway, if interested, it's just as pretty in daylight:

Featured Forum Thread: "Greetings from Italy" by Ray Sachs

-Ray

It's easy to understand why you fell in love with the place - it's absolutely gorgeous.

I had a brief look through your thread, and your photographs and the location are beautiful.

I'll enjoy a proper look tomorrow.
 
Of all the camera images I see the Merrill seem to offer the most

Its a long way off & I'll never have the option to buy all 3 or even have all 3 with me
so which is the best to choose?
I like wide angle landscape but also like portraiture> I don't like too much distortion with wide angle. I use a zoom but normally about 120max is sufficient so crops could be considered

How good is stiching with the DP2 ? = panorama shot in vertical portrait mode??

I took advantage of the big price-drop here in the UK, and bought all three, but if I had to choose one it would be the DP2M, as it seems to be the most versatile of the three. The lenses are superb.
 
I'm looking forward to getting the DP1m and the DP3m tomorrow. If this works like i think it will I'll be looking for DP2m to complete the set. We have a month long project in Ireland that's coming up soon and I think they'd be great for that work.
 
I assume same viewpoint means a scene framed in identical way, or did you mean shooting from the same point? The last would mean the fuji frame would contain more because of the larger field of view.
So far I have compared the DP2M with an Olympus E-P5 and kit lens and the results are of course very different: beside the obvious advantage in sharpness, the Sigma has clarity and detail rendition that is very natural, it reminds me of the old film days when comparing medium format with 35mm

It will take me some time to do the comparison, let me give you in the meantime an idea of the results, since I use both the Oly and the Fuji and I already compared the Oly with the X100s, shooting in RAW with tripod, at each aperture from f/2 to f/8 in 1/3 stop steps and then processed in C1.
Surprisingly the Fuji has very little advantage in rendering fine detail like foliage and grass, while it has a bit better dynamic range and its less noisy and clearer output provides with a smoother and less processed look than the Oly.
Thus, when compared to the Sigma, I expect the Fujifilm RAW files to look similar to the ones coming from the Oly
 
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