EDP - Experimental Digital Photography

You can see the corrected version of this article here. But I’ve left it so you can see the images.
As part of my testing of the Sigma 4.5mm F2.8 EX DC CIRCULAR FISHEYE HSM lens I went out with my Canon 350D that has been converted for infrared shooting. I was curious to see how the lens would perform in IR.

The Sigma is designed to produce a circular image on an APS-C sized digital camera. The field of view is 180 degrees. A lens like this is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, for sure. I don’t think I would spend the money myself to own one, but then I have only just started exploring this lens.
The shots below were taken with a variety of apertures and I found that the sharpest IR images were produced at f11 with this lens on my camera. The results are most unusual looking. Of course your real image size is much smaller than you may be used to since only the center of the image is used.

The resulting images are most interesting and I will do more work with this lens/camera combination before I return the lens, aside from my general testing of course.

Here I have added a black circular mask to cover the internal reflections.

Center of the image at f11

Center of the image at f2.8

If you are in the US you can buy the Sigma at B&H Photo.

Lens specifications can be found in the lens announcement on DIMi.

To teach my 9 year old daughter how animation can be done, we set about creating the two short animations you can see here by taking many still images with Lauren’s camera with small changes made to the models for each one. We then put these together in Adobe Premier or iMovie and exported the movies.

We spend about two hours on this and it was a great way for my daughter to get some hands on movie making experience.

All digital cameras us sensors which are sensitive to infrared light. Most recent digitals incorporate an IR blocking filter just in front of the sensor that blocks a lot of this light. However, it does not block all. Thus all digital cameras are capable of shooting in IR, just the exposure times can be quite long. This can, in fact, be an advantage for some types of photography, giving a beautiful ‘otherworld’ look as plants move in the breeze and blur, for example.

For detailed coverage of shooting IR with  normal digital cameras, see the articles  here on our sister site, DIMi.

Coming out of a discussion on the dfa Yahoo list I put out a very rough list of features for what I saw as the ideal inkjet printer for digital artists. So I have decided to flesh that rough idea out here.
(more…)