The Sigma Foveon M : Please Share your Monochrom Images

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Part of a longterm project documenting the Occupy movement in Eugene, Oregon. The focus these days is on getting the city/county to set aside small properties with portable sanitation where homeless campers can safely sleep. Here's what I wrote to accompany these in the gallery:

Notes:

'Whoville is a moveable camp of homeless folks/activists calling on the city to set aside safe places to sleep. One of the other acronyms used is SLEEPS: Safe Legally Entitled Emergency Places to Sleep. This camp was across the street from Eugene's 9th Circuit courthouse, beside the busy Union Pacific tracks, and beneath one of the main highway viaducts connecting commuters to downtown. Lots of witnesses every day. The campers were rousted from this site yesterday, and have once again relocated. But their argument is gaining adherents, and legal camps, however temporary and limited in tent sites, are being set up.

The title of the first image refers to the sign on the distant retirement center, which is not only seasonal but there because a significant number of the original retirees were advocates for peace and social justice.'
 
I have a question which will expose how little I know about Merrills. Are these images shot in RAW then converted to B&W or are they B&W straight out of the camera as a JPEG?

Thanks
 
I have a question which will expose how little I know about Merrills. Are these images shot in RAW then converted to B&W or are they B&W straight out of the camera as a JPEG?

Thanks

All of mine are shot in Raw, then converted to Tiff after minor adjustments in SPP.....from there to BW and jpeg. Cheers.
 
For me if it says, Quattro then they are ooc jpgs (that is how good the quattro jpg engine is in comparison). Otherwise it is raw converted to tiff16 for archival in Aperture. Export to the web from Aperture as a 1024x1024 max jpg.

Gary
 
Great piece of doco Robert, these are the things we don't see on the news, the struggles of life.

Thank you, Vincenzo.

These are part of 500-odd images of Occupy-related camps, people and events I've been documenting in Eugene since November 2011. Local activists have received grant support to create an archive of these images and work of other photographers and videographers (and, I hope, oral histories and life histories), which will probably be part of the open-access digital collections at U-Oregon. I just received a hard drive to compile/catalog my images, and have been working a lot on ensuring relative consistency in the composition and development. It's a good way to serve the community with visual ethnography that will be valued later by historians and social/economic justice advocates trying to visualize the persistent inequalities of our period.
 
Raymond, I shoot raw with the DP2M and convert in LR4 (examples above, e.g.) to export to RFF. As Gary and I have written in another thread, the Sigma dynamic range is very highlight-sensitive. I like to be able to make adjustments in post-processing for my exposure compensations, as well as for my usual dumb errors, before putting the work up here.

I just exported a DP2M jpg with no size restrictions (like the RFF gallery stipulates), and it weighs in at 3MB. I use a 2TB external drive for my photographs, and export to Dropbox, so there's no system strain on my older iMac/Macbook.
 
I shoot Raw too , the camera is set to mono .
I use the Sigma software and then convert to tiffs and then jpegs in PS.

This shot was switched to mono in the Sigma software .
I`m afraid that ,other than the Sigma software , my other options are rather outdated as is my PC also.:eek:

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A few more from Whoville:
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Red is a counselor for Nightingale Sanctuary, an organization advocating for the homeless. His organization now oversees 2 of the legal camps elsewhere in town.

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And this is what goes on on many corners in many cities. "Winter was hard, winter was hard," goes a poem by a Finnish writer, "Even the money in the bank was frozen."
 
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Raymond, I shoot raw with the DP2M and convert in LR4 (examples above, e.g.) to export to RFF. As Gary and I have written in another thread, the Sigma dynamic range is very highlight-sensitive. I like to be able to make adjustments in post-processing for my exposure compensations, as well as for my usual dumb errors, before putting the work up here.

I just exported a DP2M jpg with no size restrictions (like the RFF gallery stipulates), and it weighs in at 3MB. I use a 2TB external drive for my photographs, and export to Dropbox, so there's no system strain on my older iMac/Macbook.

Thanks Robert and also Vincenzo!!
 
Thanks Robert and also Vincenzo!!

For those that maybe curious, Steve Huff did a review of both the dp2 Merrill and Quattro on his site over the years. While he did not like the Merrill, he did give a pretty balanced review. This was one of the reasons I ended up buying the dp2 Merrill. About halfway down in this review he does a pretty good job of comparing the jpg and raw differences from this camera.

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2012/...-gorgeous-image-quality-but-slow-and-squeaky/

Where he did not do a good job is showing what happens as u get higher and higher iso (past 200), the difference in recoverable noise in the raw image due to what can be done in SPP versus the pretty bad noise suppression from the jpg and built-in digital path. Here the Quattro is still much better by one to one and half stops. But as always, spp will give u better control.

For Merrill cameras shoot raw+jpg.. Use the jpg for "best of" selection. Run the good ones thru spp in batch mode (tiff16 output). If u got a slow computer, walk away..get a cup of coffee, do a bit of reading. Depending on how slow (bad) your computer maybe, start w/ say 4 raws to batch, increase slowly to point where u feel comfortable.

For reference, my iMac dual core 3.6ghz, w/ 8 gb of memory could handle between 8-12 raw files. Somewhere around 14, it would crash w/ spp 5.1. Latest spp 6.1, I have encountered this yet.

Check out the hints threats for more info.

Gary
 
I have all three now and I tend to use the dp3m more than the dp1m. The dp2q currently gets the most use followed by the dp3m.

From the days of the Leica/Minolta CL, I tend to go 21/40/90 setup. So when I go wide, I tend to like wider than 28. W/ the CL, the 21 allowed me to crop to around 28 fairly easily. W/ 21 mainly for pano crop and crop 24 for where I like to shoot wide normally. Crop 28 was always pretty rare for me. The 40 perspective was what was always on the CL. 90 not as much as the 21. But I find. Use the 75 now, more than I ever used the 90 in the past.

Gary
 
Gary ty for the response...the vid is interesting and I am now wondering about the lens squeaking. I havent read anything about that before. I will soon have a new desk top computer system will a ton of RAM and hard drive so I will be able to swallow those monster files without issue but I will experiment with the downloads as you suggest.

Thanks again!
 
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