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G1 and "Cheese"

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Vittorio Fracassi

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"Cheese" is an international exhibition of, obviously, cheese. Held in the small town of Bra and promoted by a very successful organization called "Slow Food".

The affluence is terrific and the dozens of little stands are playground for impromptu photography.

The articulated screen of the G1 was right for overhead and waist shots and the small size didn't make people change expression like a pro camera would have done.

And the Summi 25/1,4 (under the menace of the 20/1,7) showed it still deserves a place in my light kit.

Hope you enjoy the simple pics and rejoice in owning such a versatile little camera.









Ciao, Vittorio
(by the way, the girl in the center of pic n.3 is my daughter Elena)
 
2nd pic is my favorite. 3rd pic is close, but that sign board is a bit distracting.

Thanks for sharing.
 
Nice images!

And the girl in #3 is simply lovely.

How did you manage to get sharp focus on her ?

Is there a face detect mode?

Please post more images.

Ciao!
Vittorio Fracassi said:
"Cheese" is an international exhibition of, obviously, cheese. Held in the small town of Bra and promoted by a very successful organization called "Slow Food".

The affluence is terrific and the dozens of little stands are playground for impromptu photography.

The articulated screen of the G1 was right for overhead and waist shots and the small size didn't make people change expression like a pro camera would have done.

And the Summi 25/1,4 (under the menace of the 20/1,7) showed it still deserves a place in my light kit.

Hope you enjoy the simple pics and rejoice in owning such a versatile little camera.









Ciao, Vittorio
(by the way, the girl in the center of pic n.3 is my daughter Elena)
Click to expand...
 
thanks for appreciating BayAreaWZ, in fact I liked the signboard, it sort of made me "feel" inside the stand.

Ciao, Vittorio.
 
thanks for appreciating Len_Gee, also from Elena!

AF with smallest possible focus area, shifting it with the cross/wheel, on her face.

Shooting RAW, never used presets or other "props".

Ciao, Vittorio.
 
Thanks for the technical information.
And your Elena is quite beautiful. Bella.

Ciao
Vittorio Fracassi said:
thanks for appreciating Len_Gee, also from Elena!

AF with smallest possible focus area, shifting it with the cross/wheel, on her face.

Shooting RAW, never used presets or other "props".

Ciao, Vittorio.
Click to expand...
 
Shows you what a good photographer with good glass can do. Really lovely, evocative images.

Would you mind sharing what you do in PP with your RAW images to get these? And yes, post some more!

Ciao
--
Estelle
 
hi Tony, thanks for appeciating! And for finding the right term: "connects". That is one reason to look at the photo a little longer.
 
hi Estelle, thanks for appreciating!

With regards to postprocessing.

It’s going to hurt the purists, but for me half the fun is walking around, preparing the capture and the capture itself, and the other half is sitting in front of a 24in calibrated Eizo screen connected to a 4GB of RAM PC running on Windows XP 64bit and using Lightroom 2.3.
Take pic.2 for example. The reasoning starts with the capture. I wanted:
  • to be right inside the scene, (that’s where the small camera, the good std focal length lens and articulated screen come in useful)
  • to keep some DOF so that the scene is linked lightly to its surroundings,
  • the central area well lit, where I would like the viewer’s attention to go after PP,
  • the highlights pushed well to the right in the histogram, nearly blown by adding +1,0EV (no problem in recovering them), so that the areas darkened by postprocessing will not show noise.
  • RAW capture, to be able to postprocess strongly
By clicking on the the link below and rolling the mouse cursor over the image you will see the colour default RAW.RW2 image. The edited B&W Lightroom image will appear by moving the mouse cursor off.

http://www.zoomview.it/page%206%20web.html#

The postprocessing in Lightroom 2.3/Develop mode was aimed at focalizing attention on the central action of “hands serving and picking small pieces of cheese”, so:
  • did away with distracting colours : applied “Grayscale”
  • did away with highlights and lights in most of the surroundings of the central scene , without generating noise in the darks = applying 16 Graduated Filters, in the positions indicated by the white dots in the B&W screen shot above
  • put more brightness and light and highlight detail on the central scene and pushed other parts in semidarkness = tweaked the other parameters and added a few Brush strokes here and there
  • added sharpness which was lost by using ISO400 and 1/60sec, in 2 steps = first applying Clarity and Sharpness and then Exporting to JPEG for viewing in dpReview with High Screen Sharpening.
  • no cropping: with the G1 it’s better to use all the sensor size to keep detail, which gets quite a beating with the workflow described above. No noise reduction to keep detail. No artificial “vignetting” in the Post-Crop section.
Voilà, in practice it takes less time to do than to describe, if you are reasonably familiar with Lightroom.
Ciao, Vittorio.
 
That was quite a tutorial, not only extremely practical but also a bit philosophical. Yes, photography is an interesting discipline for distilling reality into something related but altogether different. Like milk to cheese...

I have had lots of fun with photography over the years but was only recently promoted from Canon P&S to my GH1! I am putting off starting on the trial version of Lightroom - perhaps this will push me over the edge. Would you advise starting off with both JPEG and RAW images to get a feel of what an image is like "out of the box" versus post-processing? Come to think of it, at this stage I often shoot iA mode versus Aperture mode to see if I can outwit my camera automatic settings...

grazie mille davvero!
--
Estelle
 
Good shots but the lack of colour just didn't whet my appetite. I think that the closeups of the cheeses would have been much better in colour.

Cheers
 
hi Estelle,

go where your curiosity leads you, it's not a rational decision, it's about enjoying and sharing, so you will end up doing what you like anyway...

Ciao, Vittorio.
 
hi rocklobster,

thanks for commenting, sorry but the heavily postprocessed G1 RAW files are reasonably attractive in B&W but in colour they are "unlookable"!
 
rocklobster said:
You say that they are "unlookable" - is this because of noise (chroma) or other effects?
Click to expand...
well I don't know about "unlookable", or whether PP'ing with a colored result would have produced a similar example -- but this transformation of a rather "ordinary looking" snapshot type RAW photo into something really cool to look at (in B&W, and still looking "natural") makes me think, if I should invest more into PP skills than taking pictures.. ;-)
 
hi rocklobster,

in fact it is a matter of colours, the white balance is so upset by pulling and pushing the histogram that the original whites look at best grey and at worse blue.

To recover the original white you can shift WB, but then all other shades look different or you desaturate the blue, but it goes out of the greens and from other blue objects in the pics etc.
You can try for yourself.

Sensors and processors behave differently, and the one of the G1 is already a wonder in many ways but it leaves little headroom for this.

Cheers, Vittorio.
 
Greetings,

Your daughter is radiant. Her poise and surroundings further benefit from the excellent composition. A moment well captured.

Best,
Seth

--
What if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?

--
wallygoots.smugmug.com
wallygoots.blogspot.com
 
Dear Vittorio, great pictures! I own a G1, and I have been (but before) to visit Cheese. We made an interactive CD-Rom of this great show.

Are you by chance on FLICKR?
--
Roberto
 
Tony Reynolds said:
The woman smiling directly into the camera connects the viewer with the crowd at the window. Lovely smile...
Click to expand...
Beautiful shot.....love the b&w - and the girl makes the shot.

Beautiful girl too btw.

Maria
 
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