Cloud Portraits

[akv]

Hi all,
Here are some cloud pics I took a few days back.
Sigma SD14 70-300
Most of them were shot in 70mm at ISO 50
The last one was shot in 1600, it reminds me of the xerox copies I used to get at school, at least it's harder to see the dust spots with all that noise!
Heavily processed in SPP.

enjoy!

 

[netzuser]

Hi akv,
great shots,
but what happend to the last one?
It is noisy and I think there is some banding in it.
Also that one has no exif with it.
Did you try another converter?
Regards
Uwe

 

[akv]

Hi Uwe, thanks.
I only use SPP for processing the RAW files. Not sure why it doesn't have exif.
I shot it in 1600 ISO and I sometimes get banding from that. I thought it was an issue with my flash or battery but I didn't use the flash and the batteries in the grip were fully charged this time. So not too sure what's causing the banding. The user notalent also put up an example of the banding he's experienced.

Exif:
f8
1/2500s
ISO 1600
A
70mm(70-300)
MED Raw

I noticed too that some of the other pictures have "splotchy" bitmapped sky. I think that might be from using MS Paintbrush to shrink them down to size.

 

[Steaphany]

akv,

Do you normally shoot in the RAW Medium setting ?

The thought came to me that the banding you see occasionally may come from the SD14's image processor resizing the image.

The RAW Hi setting has a resolution of 2640 x 1760, a 1 to 1 correspondence between imager photosite and image pixel. I use this exclusively, apart from time lapse shoots.

The RAW Medium setting must squeeze each pixel by a factor 0f 0.672 to reduce the 2640 x 1760 photosite image to a 1776 x 1184 pixel image. Depending on the algorithm employed to perform this compression, the resulting image may show artifacts, i.e. the banding.

Here is an experiment to try. Find a scene/lighting situation which you had banding occur in the past. Shoot a set of photos in the RAW Medium and RAW Hi settings and see if the banding shows up through out.

If the RAW Hi are fine while the RAW Medium show banding, then the banding would probably by a resize algorithm artifact.

 

[jasonh]

Med Raw? Why? With the low cost of storage these days, I see no reason to ever shoot with anything but the highest resolution possible...

 

[akv]

Thanks Steaphany and Jason,
I shoot in Med Raw for faster download to my crappy laptop and it doesn't use as much room. I shot in Hi Raw one time and it took me the whole day just to upload and process the pics and I had to delete a whole bunch of stuff cause I ran out of room.
lol. I guess that's another thing one doesn't think about when getting a digital camera, you don't have the film and processing costs but you do need the space.
I'm waiting for this laptop to give out before upgrading. I think I'm going to have to get an external hard drive though for all my files soon.
I'll give your suggestion a try Steaphany, thanks!

 

[Steaphany]

akv,

This was my most recent addition to my computer facilities:

Western Digital's 1TB External Drive

The price has come down since I purchased mine.

Adding one of these will give you enough space and just plug in the drive to your new computer when you upgrade.

 

[akv]

holy smokes!
I remember when 4 megs of RAM cost that much. lol.
Thanks for the link Steaphany.