Paving Back Campus

The smell of asphalt displaced the usual scents of spring and new growth today.

I've been photographing the University of Toronto's Back Campus Fields Project for over a year. Today it turned from being paved over metaphorically to literally. If it were a parking lot it would comfortably fit over 400 cars; if it was a building covering the same area it would need to have a substantial green roof to offset the loss of green space.

Instead it will be carpeted.

More photos from today can be found on my Back Campus Camera project blog.

Twenty-One

I rather like this photo, despite all of the birds.

Skyline May 2014

The current skyline of Toronto as seen from Humber Bay park.

There are ten construction cranes visible in this image.

Blue Container

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.

Tank

Another of my standard subjects that I photograph just to see how each camera works. The metering on the DP3M is not quite what I'm used to, so learning how it handles highlights has been critical.

This photo was shot with a +1EV adjustment and then put through the SPP-LR post-processing routine with only minor adjustments. I have to say that it's the best result I've seen so far.

Vine

Vines are something of a standard subject for me – the results are never particularly significant, but they're plentiful where I am.

The first image is from today, taken with the Sigma DP3 Merrill. The joke is that it's essentially a film camera, with the only argument being about which format best captures its essence. The second photo is from my Zeiss Ikon and dedicated 35mm film scanner, which is about as good as small format gets; the third photo is from my Fuji GX680, which is an excellent medium format camera, but the flatbed scanner gives results that can only be called 'atmospheric'.

The DP3M really does have absurd resolution. These film cameras pose no challenge at all, although a decent scan of a good 6x8cm negative would be interesting to see. I haven't yet tried it against my D800, but I did do an impromptu head-to-head with a new 50Mpx CMOS Hasselblad. It might not mean much, but I'm certainly satisfied.

Do Not Lean

I've been here before.

Sigma DP3 Merrill.