Travel with the Light L16

Godfrey

Godfrey

somewhat colored
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Dec 15, 2011
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Silly Valley, California, USA
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I left on a cruise on February 2. It's a seven day trip from Miami to Nassau, to points on the Gulf of Mexico and eastern Mexican coast.

A few from the last couple of days... I've posted a few prior if you want to click to the flickr pages and walk back through my flickr stream.


Girl Running An Errand - Roatàn, Honduras 2019
Light L16 (preview quality)


Chaccoben Ruins - Costa Maya, Mexico 2019
Light L16 (preview quality)


Three Men At The Bar - At Sea, Caribbean 2019
Light L16 (preview quality)
​

The rest will have to wait. It's the last day of the cruise, we're in port in Miami tomorrow morning and then it's the air trek back to California.

The Light L16 proves to be a very compact and capable travel camera. It's not without its amusing quirks, but so much capability in such a small package is a delight. Once I learned how to get what I want out of it, I'm very pleased with it. Remember: All of these are just JPEG preview quality images, quick-transfers to my iPad Pro 11 at about 2 Mpixel. The real thing will happen when I get home and download the full 50 Mpixel images into Lumen and render them at the full camera resolution.

🙂

Enjoy!
G
 
I'm back home now and have started processing my photos to full resolution. And ... DANG! The Light L16 did a spectacular job!

---
Last day on my cruise, he was getting a few photos made of his costume. He allowed me to make a portrait too...


enjoy!
G
 
Archiver said:
No kidding, that last image came out of the L16? That's pretty amazing for such a peculiar camera.
Click to expand...

Yup: The image quality out of the Light L16 is just incredible. Peculiar or not, it is a terrific piece of photographic equipment. 🙂

All the other photos in this thread until that one were processed on the road using the 2.5 Mpixel JPEG preview files. For this last one, I pulled the Light raw data into its dedicated processing app, Lumen, and rendered a full 50 Mpixel image. I'll be reprocessing all the others (and the several dozen others) now to finish quality images.

G
 
I never really looked at the L16 as it seemed a bit too radical and gimmicky, but the sample images on the website are very impressive, and that last photo is frankly astonishing for what looks like a bizarre design.

Exactly how 'good' is the L16 image quality in comparison with conventional cameras? Would you say it is as good as m43 or aps-c? I'm not looking necessarily for that kind of depth of field control, more about dynamic range, detail and 'richness' of the image.

Can you export a tiff which can be worked on further in Lightroom?
 
Archiver said:
I never really looked at the L16 as it seemed a bit too radical and gimmicky, but the sample images on the website are very impressive, and that last photo is frankly astonishing for what looks like a bizarre design.

Exactly how 'good' is the L16 image quality in comparison with conventional cameras? Would you say it is as good as m43 or aps-c? I'm not looking necessarily for that kind of depth of field control, more about dynamic range, detail and 'richness' of the image.

Can you export a tiff which can be worked on further in Lightroom?
Click to expand...

I would say that, at the limit, the L16 image quality rivals that of the best FF and medium format digital cameras, and is on par with my Leica CL + M and R lenses. But, like with a Polaroid SX-70, there are differences to how it renders because of its capture technology and the way you render what it's captured. And there are different limitations to what it can do as well, which you have to approach with a different mindset.

Not an easy to articulate thing... In the end, an excellent photograph is an excellent photograph and should be judged on the merits it displays rather than how you achieved it. The L16 does not replace my Leica CL or M-D, or Polaroid SX-70 variants; it complements them with different strengths and attributes.

The L16 is not a simple camera, although it can be used very simplistically. It has various modes of operation in use that take a while to learn how to get the most out of. The ability to fine tune focus point and depth of field in post is just one part of it, and a small part, by and large. When shooting, it includes computational operations to handle wide dynamic range and low light that you must understand to achieve its best performance, it has ways for you to affect the focus and exposure that are critical to getting that performance, etc. There's not much in it that's actually gimmicky at all, it's just complex. And the complexity is there for good reasons.

The workflow when using the L16 must always funnel through its dedicated app, Lumen, for best quality as that is the only tool that can do the maximum quality integration of the whole capture and express the full capabilities of the camera. From that point you can do finish output to JPEG or you can output to DNG raw files. Then you can import those into whatever other image processing software you prefer to complete your rendering work.

There's a good bit to this process that differs from what I do when I'm using the Leica CL or M-D, but much is the same. I think that's saying I'm going to have to write an article about it. Another time ... 🙂

G
 
Archiver said:
Thanks, Godfrey. 🙂 Looks like they are a. sold out and b. $2000, so I won't be buying one any time, soon. But you've got me really intrigued.
Click to expand...

Yes, the L16 production run is completely sold out for the present. I spoke with Tech Support and they can't give a date, at present, when the next batch will be available. It will come sometime soon, I'm sure.

And they're not cheap, I agree; about the cost of a mid-line to pro DSLR and a good lens. I was an early backer of the project (put my money on the line in early 2015) so I obtained mine on Dec 19, 2017, from the first production batch, for about half off. I've come to be very happy I put that money down over the past year...! It is truly a very interesting and very capable camera.

G
 
Surprisingly good imagining from this unusual camera. But I think owning one would freak me out 🙂 .................

spider_eyes_by_rickytaun_dbc4rdq-pre.jpg
 
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