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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Cameras

Field Review: Sigma DP2s (Day 3)

Chris Gampat
No Comments
08/02/2010
4 Mins read

Last Updated on 08/02/2010 by

One hot evening in NYC, I took a walk around downtown Manhattan with a friend of mine to do some random shooting with the Sigma DP2s to try out the new and improved autofocus. Everything was shot in RAW and all photos were carefully metered. So how versatile are these raw files? They’re pretty damn good actually.

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Equipment Used

Sigma DP2S

VF-21: A viewfinder that attaches to the hot shoe. The VF-21 is, essentially, a piece of glass that helps with composition.

HA-21: The lens hood. If you put the HA-21on, you can get rid of the lens cap that comes with the camera to protect the lens when retracted. The lens will retract into the lens hood. It offers some extra sexiness and bulkiness to the camera.

EF-140: A flash that can attach to the hot shoe. The Sigma EF-140 is an awesome accessory. Like many of you professional photographers, a great compact camera is something we all yearn for.

RAW Files Performance

As you can see, some really amazing color can be retrieved from these files even with processing in Lightroom for the dark areas. For this photo, all that was done was some slight changes in the contrast and saturation bars as well as raising the lighting in the darker areas. Once again though, I shot in RAW. The Sigma RAW files are turning out to be on par with those of Canon’s and Nikon’s and even easier to work with than Leica’s.

In addition to the colors, lots of detail can be extracted because of the Foveon sensor in conjunction with the nice 24mm F2.8 lens which happens to be decently sharp for what it is. Before processing, the actual photo looked fairly bland—which is very rare for this camera. However, some contrast increase and clarity increase does wonders.

High ISO Test

This photo took quite a bit of color processing to look this way. There is still, however, some visible noise in it. The image was edited this way to make the noise look good: which is a common tactic used by all photographers if they just can’t get rid of it.

At times, the performance can be quite good and might not need much editing. While this can be common, it is more common with the Sigma DP2s because of the Green, Red and Blue photo-diodes that process the colors individually. Additionally, the lens is fast enough and the sensor large enough to make the out-of-focus area noise look rather film-like.

But there are some photos that no matter how hard you try to process all of the noise out of them, it just won’t be good enough. The above photo has lots of color noise in the water, boats, and darker areas.

Autofocus Test

This flower was moving quite a bit in the wind since we were right by the water. My friend actually said that this image was going to be blurry as hell because of it.

The Sigma proved him wrong because it took some great color and delivered great focusing results.

The camera doesn’t focus exceptionally well in low-light though. In fact, at this point, users are better off just switching the camera into manual focus mode and using the dial.

Amazingly though, it can focus on the minutest of details amongst many other objects and keep them well in focus. The focusing point was on the dead center plant here. The plants were moving about in the wind but the camera was still able to lock onto the little flowers in the middle.

But sometimes it can also be unreliable. This image took some work because the camera just wouldn’t focus on the center-most building. So the focusing point had to be changed to the one on the middle right—which focuses on the building right next to the center-most one. The camera finally switched into infinity focusing for this, but it took a number of tries.

As a constructive criticism though, I really wish that there were more autofocus points than the nine placed around the center and I also wish that they were placed differently, rather than in a square. It would allow for more versatility in the focusing methods.

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Written by

Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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