Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Trying out a medium format camera

Well, not actually a true medium format camera. Shooting pyro with one of those would be VERY tricky (and expensive). What I did use was a new Nikon D-800, that shoots around 36 megapixels. Amazing detail with a dSLR camera. But how is it for shooting pyro?

Well, some of the same problems are there. To try and get as much color in the stars you really need to reduce a LOT of the light coming into the camera. Because the photo sites are smaller, the transition between blown-out white and color is more gradual, but this can be destroyed by a heavy hand in Lightroom or Photoshop. The camera can go down to ISO 50 (and I do put it there), but even at f/16 the images were blowing out. I didn't want to go down any further on the first go around because there was some detail involved that I didn't want goobered up.

In the end, I did use Lightroom because I needed a bit of detail to come through (graduation mask), as well as come color correction. In the end, I thought the camera did a pretty good job. I was expecting more digital noise than what I got. I still had to correct for it, but not very much. As such, it was able to maintain some amount of detail that comes from a high-pixel count camera.

My impression? Well, I'm still having to process RAW files to get the most out of the image. While you can downsize JPGs in the camera, you can't downsize the RAWs, so each image can take around 40mb which slows down the ENTIRE post-production process. For pyro, I'm not so sure it's worth it. I'll definately need some more HD space...