Living with the SD14, a Professional View

Let’s start as I mean to continue, cards on the table.This account is written for other photographers – people who take photographs rather than computer geeks or mobile phone nerds: I assume that, unlike them you’ll have a life and you’ll want to be out there chasing images. After all, that is what the SD14 is for.

Through the long evolution of my photography, first with film and then with digital, I have sought pin-sharp detail and colour fidelity, whether I am dealing with landscapes, buildings or the scales on a butterfly wing. That is my kind of photography and I make no apologies.

My cameras have to earn a living; they are not taken out, set on a pedestal, drooled over and put back again. Thus, just two days after taking the SD14 from its box on 2nd May 2007, it was with me on a flower-filled Sicilian hillside recording an orchid I had waited two decades to see. Every day since then I have used it in un-compromising fashion for my professional work. The ultimate trust was to use it to photograph my daughter’s wedding –one false move and the wrath would have been galactic. It worked superbly.

Crab Spider

I began putting down some thoughts after feeding in the words “Sigma SD14 reviews” to a search engine and then being astonished by the widely-differing opinions for Sigma digital SLRs seemingly have the ability to activate love-hate wars like no other. I think it has something to do with the temerity of a small company posing any sort of challenge to the great Gods Canon and Nikon whose acolytes then leap unbidden into a vocal and, often hysterical, defence of their choices.

Worryingly, those people who loudly voice opinions in the photographic press also seem unable to come to grips with basic terminology (the word pixel for instance), have no idea of the difference between sharpness and resolution and are oblivious to the fact that pixel count is not a substitute term for either. Sorry, but I have a perennial detestation of sloppiness (put it down to a physics background). But I have to note that the SD14 seems to gets the ‘thumbs up’ from people who take photography seriously: the thumbs down often comes from those who are either not practising photographers in a sense that you or I would understand or those who feel free to comment without using the camera…

So, the conclusion first…if you want exceptionally fine-detailed, beautiful coloured images that seem to jump off the computer screen and produce superb prints up to A2 (see later) then this is a camera I can unreservedly recommend because that is what I use it for. It is a refreshingly uncluttered machine and free of extraneous gimmicks (exposure modes, bells and whistles) so, if that is not what you wish to hear then I’ve saved you reading further.

In the field

First let me tell you the kind of tasks I set a camera so that you can better assess the viability of the SD14 as your choice of machine.

One major passion is for wildlife subjects -often in close-up. This includes plants and insects in particular and any camera I use has to be equally at home in the field with macro lens and macroflash and also in the studio where it can be coupled to an array of gadgets I have built or modified. Yes, I would love to make a living from close-up, but the reality is that any camera I own has to work much harder than that on a gamut of freelance and editorial work from flowers in the landscape, buildings, trees, sunsets to people ….all obvious draws here in central Italy where I now live and work. I embraced the whole digital business six years ago and love the element of control I get from start to finish: there is now no one else to blame.

I can certainly see that the SD14 is not the camera for everyone (in fact that camera does not exist). If your living depends on speedily-grabbed pictures, bursts of shots and brilliant low-light performance then I think that the physical limits of the Foveon sensor would make the SD14 the wrong choice. The burst rate is low and even at ISO 400 noise is beginning to reveal itself. But then those are not drawbacks for me or for a legion of photographers who can and do take time...

Praying Mantis

Working with the SD14 – the routine part.

For all aspects of my work of this the SD14 has proved itself day after day and I have grown to love using it – in fact, thanks to a life change where I seem to spend much of my time covered in cement or sawdust, the arrival of this camera injected a much needed dose of enthusiasm. Serendipitously its arrival coincided with the appearance of lots of butterflies, fields brimming with poppies and all sorts of photogenic things just metres from home….On a day to day basis, there is no difficulty producing quality images with the SD14 – it is easy to use, as quick as most will need it to be and it feels comfortable in the hand. Furthermore, detail is captured with colour fidelity at a level that makes it possible to get those 50MB files that agencies demand (even for use where 5MB and less would be more than adequate, clients all now demand giant files…).

My ‘workflow’ with this camera has been determined by the time that I needed to spend in front of the computer when I would rather be out and about taking pictures. So, first thing – I use a Lexar card reader that downloads images in a fraction of the time. I have only just started using Adobe Lightbox on the Mac so cannot comment honestly on its worth as a RAW converter.

Currently, I use Photopro to produce a set of ‘Same Sized Tiffs’ from the pictures I choose to keep or that are deemed worthy of printing or sending to agencies. The RAW files will be archived on a hard drive and DVD. I am pretty consistent with exposure so I find any tweaking in RAW is never too onerous to carry out – in this respect the Photopro controls for shadow, highlight, fill-light are excellent. But please Sigma why does it run so painfully slowly and why have you abandoned Mac users and not produced version 3 for them. If you are serious about getting pros to use the SD14 then wake up to the fact that many pros use Macs…

I wrote a short routine in Photoshop to convert these Tiffs to Genuine Fractals Format and then upscale via this programme to produce tiffs of 50MB and more. Long-winded yes but I run it over night if needed. The time factor makes me a bit more selective…

So why this rather than the file-doubling facility in Photopro. Well, Careful visual comparison of prints and of files on screen (at near individual pixel level) shows that when it comes to A3 sizes and larger the Genuine Fractals approach works more effectively than either file-doubling with Photopro or up-scaling with the various options in CS2. Lines and edges are visibly sharper producing an overall sensation of increased sharpness.

The reason is, I think, the following. Many of my pictures of natural subjects at close quarters contain small hairs, veins on leaves and insect wings and other details that are essentially lines or recognisable geometric shapes: same thing with details of buildings (brickwork, stones and so on…). Genuine Fractals functions by recognising patterns that depend on “fractals’ – shapes of snowflakes, veins on a leaf and so on are natural examples of these. These patterns can be ‘scaled’ to preserve relationships in shapes (the angles and curves etc) and thus, with large prints the tiny details I relish are reproduced rather than broken up by random addition of extra pixels. Those hairs on a bee’s knees are the kind of stuff this method renders superbly.

Some Snippets

People are beginning to discover things with the SD14 that are not in the manual:

1. Infra-red sensitivity.

The glass that protects the sensor from dust has a coating that also acts as an Infra-red filter. Without it the SD14 becomes (as claimed by a number of people) “the best infra-red camera on the market” with a lot of room for experimentation.

2. Shooting to the right

Dr Andrew Stevens writes in his Review of the SD14 the BJP (02 May 2007) of over-exposing by 2 f-stops in RAW mode at ISO 100 equivalent and then “pulling back” in Photopro by 2EV to give an effective ISO 25: Kodachrome25 lives in digital form with wonderful colours tones and detail…

For those shooting in RAW mode exposure advice runs counter to what one was used to from film – remember underexposing slightly to increase transparency detail? With RAW exposure the nearer you can push to over-exposure without blasting out highlights the better.

The term ‘shooting to the right’ has been coined for is easier to look at the histogram and adjust exposure until it moves towards the right but stops short of ‘clipping’ where detail is lost.

Many DSLRs have a dynamic range of about six stops to encompass tones from bright whites to darkest blacks. They encode capture using 12 bits of data which means 4096 discrete tonal levels: half (2048) reside in the brightest level, quarter (1024) in the next then 512.256 and 64 for each stop down in the tonal scale. This means that in the lightest areas you can get the greatest subtlety since that is where there are most tonal levels. And it also tends to reduce noise in the shadows.

In practice with RAW it is better to darken an image for this adds levels in shadow areas. In most cameras, the idea of exposing for the middle gray is a hangover from film days – this is what produces the most pleasing JPEGS.

With RAW it is better to expose for the highlights…its never as easy as you want it to be.