Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Here are some more intentional out of focus paintings, oops I mean photographs.

Taken with the Sony DSC-V3, the top image was shot at f4.0 again showing that you can get interesting bokeh under the right conditions with a small sensor.

Everything that can turn green around here seems to have.  And chlorophyll reflects infrared light very well resulting in a bright white pseudo snow when recorded with my camera in night shot mode.  I exaggerated the grain in Lightroom but see that it didn’t translate that well when down sampled to web size.

Some of the most effective infrared images I’ve seen have been of reflections on water.  I hadn’t really thought too much about it but it became clear to me when I took these pictures.   The top one is an infrared shot while the bottom one is a regular capture converted to black and white.  You can see that for the infrared image the water behaves like a mirror with little from below the surface showing.  I will use this enlightenment to try to capture some better images if the opportunity presents itself.

Another day another walk.  Photography can be a great reason to get out and get some excercise, even just a lunch time walk.

In keeping with my current exploration of what I can get out of my Sony DSC-V3 I’ve been using it a lot more lately.  In combination with Lightroom 3’s new noise processing and shooting in RAW I am able to get good clean images that I am pleased with.  I can even get some depth of field separation when I use the camera in certain ways.  With the lens zoomed most of the way out and by forcing the smallest available aperture I can get a shallow enough depth of field and quite good bokeh.  Of course once I had my nice clean images I processed them in a way that defeated the whole purpose.

I shoot RAW with my DSLR and my compact camera, because it allows me to get the maximum out of the sensors with the most up to date processing.  Shooting jpeg sets the image processing with what is available at the time by the camera manufacturer and usually doesn’t allow for much improvement.  Here are some comparison images at 100% magnification both between RAW and Jpeg and comparing the Sony DSC-V3 to my Pentax K-7.  I did these tests for my self but thought I would share the results no matter how esoteric.

Sony DSC-V3 100ISO RAW vs jpeg   (File size 1.16 Mbyte)

Sony DSC-V3 800ISO jpeg vs RAW   (File size 1.4 Mbyte)  This is where the differences are most apparent

DSC-V3 vs Pentax K-7 at 100 ISO  Both RAW

If the best camera is the one you have with you then the best subject is the one that’s around you.  I went for a lunch time walk around where I was working and took some images as I went. 

Some more images created with the Sony DSC-V3 and an infrared filter.  The available light was very low so really I should have removed the neutral density filter that I use with this combination but I didn’t and so the image sharpness suffered for it as I ended up with shutter speeds in the 1/4 second range while handholding the camera.  There is no excuse for laziness, at least that’s how I think the saying goes but you can always claim that that was the look you wanted.

While by digital camera standards this camera is now ancient, November of 2004, I still enjoy using it for Infrared photo’s and sometimes just because I really like it.  One thing I’ve recently started to do is to shoot RAW with it despite the fact that the write times with RAW are very long.  By shooting RAW and processing in the latest version of Lightroom 3 I am able to wring a lot more detail out of the files than ever before essentially giving it some new life.