Black Pearl

Cold, windy and drizzling here today.....of course it is....I'm not at work

I have new (to me) car syndrome so my week consists of cleaning and fussing over all the dead flies Day off today but instead of going out with the missus for a child free explore and lunch we're sitting watching a repair bloke rip the oven apart in a hope of stopping it tripping the entire houses electrics every time you turn it on....exciting stuff

Holy crap on a cracker BatMan!! How the bloody hell am I supposed to sort through this weeks postings - well done by the way - and find a winner? Other than just blindly sticking a pin in the forum and hoping for the best I have actually looked through as many of this weeks images as is humanly possible to picked one I like. Its random, its quirky and frankly its one I like which is kinda the whole point of this thread........so.....this weeks winner is: Polly Wooden bowl, wooden fruit , wouldn't eat it ! Original thread here:

Change any setting you require then click on the icon top right of the panel (four horizontal lines) and chose "Save New Camera Raw Defaults"

Thanks very much - who doesn't love spring colour eh

If you think in terms of rivals it quite cheap. A Fujifilm X100f is about £1200 and while it’s a massively more refined machine it’s kind of the same principle - APSC sensor, fixed lens etc.

A bayer sensor with a quoted 20 million pixels has 20 million pixels. The fact that 10 million are green, 5m are blue and 5m red is kind of irrelevant, there are still 20m of them in total. Now the Foveon X3 Quattro is a different kettle of fish entirely. It has a 19.6 megapixel top layer and two 4.9 megapixel layers beneath. The standard output is 19.6mp (the same as the top layer) but the resolution is reportedly comparable to that from a 39mp Bayer-pattern sensor.

Full sized file... https://www.flickr.com/photos/16398848@N08/40147195540/sizes/o/

Very sharp with lots of fine detail. The files don't have a great deal of dynamic range and if you push the shadows the noise goes through the roof but if you'e very, very careful with their capture and processing the results are superb.

Sigma came to Sunderland on Friday with all their kit....including their rather unusual cameras. I got chatting to the rep, who I've known for years, and he offered me one of the cameras for a long (ish) term loan. Choice was mine so I went with a dp2 Quattro which has a Foveon X3 sensor and a 30mm f2.8 lens that ends up as a 45mm with the 1.5x crop. Now if you haven't come across Sigma cameras before - don't worry as few people have - they are a little unusual. Designed by an architect, made for one of the the family owners as a pet project and offered for sale to the public without any intentions of them turning a profit. The sensor is a triple layer affair with every pixel recording every colour, your camera has a grid of red/green/blue pixels. The raw files only open in the Sigma software which is terrible (the rep told me this before I even took the camera) and everything runs at a snails pace. The shape of the dp cameras (there are four as you need a separate one for each focal length offered) is a bit odd meaning it doesn't sit well in the hand, the controls don't follow a logical placement, the battery is good for less than 200 shots, there's no electronic viewfinder, it doesn't shoot video and the SD card sits behind a rubber cover. Now I agree I'm not painting this in a good light but I love unusual photographic kit and I love experimenting with new things. I've been out the last couple of days shooting it alongside my Fuji and the experience is growing on me. I love the look of the camera as it is just so mad, the files once you've fought the software are astonishingly detailed and the lens is razor sharp corner to corner. I'll update as I go along with any further observations and images I shoot them **click to see full sized for bed results** The insert is a 100% crop of the extreme bottom right corner of the fame.

Taken this morning - three shots joined in Lr.

Fujifilm: X-T1 XF 18-55mm f2.8/4 XF-55-200mm f3.5/4.8 XF 35mm f1.4 XF 60mm f2.4 Macro Samyang: 12mm f2 Vintage: Carl Zeiss Jena - Pancolar - 50mm f1.8 Zebra Pentacon 50mm f1.8 Helios 44-2 58mm f2 Helios 44m 58mm f2 Helios 44m-4 58mm f2 Jupitor 8 50mm f2 Industar 50mm f3.5 Takumar 55mm f1.8 Tamron 200mm f3.5 AD2 Nikkor-H 28mm f3.5

No days off this week so need something to get me going this morning...

Fab shots - well done.

A masterful image - fantastic choice. Well done Fooj old bean

Its on the drive selector (the one under the ISO dial) and looks like an old fashioned movie camera with film reels on the top.

Better late than never. This weeks winner, a fine architectural image with well placed human interest. Well done Ryewolf, a crackin' image. Original content HERE

Might be there Sunday but it depends on the weather, if its good I may dodge over to the Lakes.

Had to be, a stunning image. Well done @kev7d

Aye, its a good'n that.

I'm in a Sunday afternoon mood...

Currently reading Hard Fall by J B Turner which turned up on my Kindle last month having pre-ordered it ages back. Previous to that I've just finished the The Warlord Chronicles trilogy by Bernard Cornwell which was excellent.