Monday, August 16, 2010

Camera West at the ProPhoto Expo

Fun weekend!

Dan Leto asked if l'd like to help him out at the Professional Photographers of California ProPhoto Expo at the South San Francisco Conference Center. He didn't have to ask twice as I thought it would be cool hanging out with other photographers and seeing some of the new products vendors had on display during the two day show.

The star of the show was clearly the incredible Leica S2 that Dan brought for people to get a hands on experience with a camera most could not afford. The S2 however is one amazing camera with it's 37.5 megapixels, collected on a Kodak 30 x 45mm CCD sensor through Leica's legendary lenses.

We had Shelby, a professional model posing at our booth so the public got to shoot her with the S2 which was tethered to a 23 inch Apple Cinema display. The images popped up on the screen through Leica's S2 Image Shuttle software which fed the raw 16 bit DNG files into Adobe Lightroom 3. It was fun to blow up a very small portion of the image and watch people's jaws drop as they saw just how sharp the images were.

Here is a full frame, along with a 1:1 photo from the same image showing the incredible sharpness this camera can produce. No post processing was done with these. Shot with the Leica APO-Elmar-S 180mm f/3.5 lens, 1/125 sec at f 3.5 at ISO 160. Note the sharpness and shallow depth of field of this lens at it's max aperture.



Just for fun, I shot a little time-lapse of the Camera West booth with a GoPro Hero on still camera mode, 1 frame every 2 seconds with the 2,238 images put on a 30 frames per second timeline. Also added a bit of blur with the CHV Electronics Long Exposure plug-in for Final Cut Pro.

Enjoy!



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