Camera Blog

This will likely be my final post before I take off for Europe for 10 days.  I had the opportunity to take the DP2 out last night for Portland’s infamous Last Thursday festival/street fair/celebration, and for the first time I really got to put the little guy through its paces.

The most challenging aspect that I had to overcome was the autofocus.  I am so used to the 40D SLR that I’m really having to re-learn how to ensure that a high percentage of the shots are perfectly in focus.  I played around with the manual focus, but I only had marginal success.  The following pictures are candid and hardly works of art, but they do show a bit more of what this camera is capable of.

ISO 200, f/9, 1/125

ISO 200, f/3.2, 1/500

ISO 100, f/2.8, 1/50th

ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/80th

ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/80th

I was struck by how little processing each image needed, especially compared to my big Canon.   A simple adjustment of the ‘Blacks’ slider in Lightroom got most of the shots 80% of the way there, and a couple of curves, sharpening, and saturation tweaks were generally all that was needed to finish it off.  When the focus is right-on the pictures really sing, and I’m starting to see the mythical “pop” that people attribute to the Foveon sensor.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back on June 9th with plenty more DP2 impressions and a whole lot more pictures.

Cheers,

Peter

This is a review of the much-anticipated Sigma DP2 compact camera that was released in May, 2009.

I hope to make it clear in both broad strokes and in great detail why this camera is: revolutionary, a hopeful sign of things to come, a success, and a big steaming pile of compromises.

Please read on for the full review.