… Sigma and Wabi Sabi

I shot the SD14 professionally for 13 years. From 2007 to 2020. I have 5 SD14 bodies. One was a gift from the company and I believe it is #6 off the assembly line. I also have a very late copy that has the TRUE processor in it. SilkyPix will not open the X3F files from this body. Needless to say, I have shot this camera a lot.

The beautiful picture below of the beautiful girl from the SD14 promo materials suggested to me that this might be a good fit for my work. I believe it would be nearly impossible to get those skin tones from a Quattro or fp file. Yes, the skin tones could be rotated to approximate what we see below, but those cams don't do it naturally. Naturally, skin tones run R/B. Years ago, I once had lunch with Dick Lyon who told me that the SD14 color followed the SD10 color but improved metamerism.

SD14 Girl

Below are two exposures from identical tripod position. You can see the SPP and lens in the description. The first is out of the SD14. The second, the SD Quattro. Both shot with the 50/1.4 ART at f5.6 focused on the Siemens Star. Further down are screenshots of the SPP edits.

I learned a long time ago that seldom is there a perfect white balance point from which to sample. Instead, using the 4 way arrow keys and watching the far right side of the histogram, the RGB channels can be brought to a place of fine white balance as they line up on top of one another. This scene is lit from above with warm sunlight and in front with cold, northern bluish light. There is no good one place to sample from.

The SDQ has better neutral grays but the SD14 is actually a bit more color accurate. The front of the crayon box is that yellowy-grn. And the table top is not the reddish cast we see in the SDQ file. But at first blush, white balancing as I described above produced two very similar and high quality images. (I actually did not look at the images while I was adjusting color in SPP.)

In any case, yellow-green cast? Not part of my long experience with the SD14.

SDIM6009 SD14 50_14ART SPP352

_DQ_4965 SDQ 50_14ART SPP682

SD14 50_14ART SPP352

SDQ 50_14ART SPP682