One final DP3M photo from today's commute home. It's just a quick raw conversion – as much as anything to do with the Merrill can be called 'quick' – and it was only meant as a colour and exposure test. But the DP3M is the first camera that I've bought because I really like the way its photos look, and this one has that little something that makes it work for me.
It goes without saying that reading the numbers on the bar-coded asset tag isn't even a challenge on the full file.
The Merrill is a camera that punishes sloppy technique. Its LCD-only viewfinder is poor, the light will change by the time the post-exposure histogram is available, each battery will only endure fifty exposures, the files are large, the bespoke raw-conversion software is clumsy and slow, the resulting tiff files that move to Lightroom are ninety megabytes each, and it's only when they're imported to Lightroom that I can have any real sense of what they look like.
If there's a mistake in the shutter-pushing part of this sequence then I'm guaranteed to not know about it in time to fix it pre-post, and the data workflow is so laborious that I'm inhibited from bracketing or taking follow-up shots that are second nature with any other digital camera.
It's the next best thing to shooting film.
Yet for all that there's no question that I'll be bringing the Merrill whenever I take my thousand-mile day trips. In fact, rather than leave it at home, I just might spend some of my weight savings on bringing a little monopod along as well. Rather than being a hassle, anything that improves my confidence in a sharply focused and properly composed photo is an outright blessing.
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