Tuesday 8 September 2009

Phase One master class with Drew in California!

I have just finished a mini tour of Scandinavia with Phase One, Showcasing the P40 and the P65+ Backs along with a sneak preview of their new Camera, complete with its in lens shutters and a highly responsive shutter release.

Now it was fun, and I will be sharing some of the pics we shot there soon, but as with all day long workshops they are over all too soon.

I often have thought how great it would be to let people into my world, in a small and select way, using the equipment I use on a daily basis, both cameras and lighting, not to mention a download of my crazy mind!

Photographing a range of subjects in a beautiful location....showing fellow photographers exactly how I create my 'Forest' series and recreating similar shots



The good news this is no longer a mere thought but a reality

This year on 25-30th October I will be at the Phase One Master class held at Paso Robles Workshop

In addition to Phase One technique, the workshop will cover lighting on location and production planning for field shoots. Students will work in 3-person teams for the first half of the week. On Thursday, the class will work together on the production of a Drew-sized location shoot in the oak forest surrounding Paso Robles, in the heart of California's wine land


All this and supported by Phase One with one of their technicians in attendance along with 5 Phase One P45+ cameras for the class to use


I'm looking forward to what will be an outstanding and memorable workshop

5 comments:

Jan Moren said...

Not sure if I should comment on this here, but since you may know and educate me, here goes:

I dropped in at an exhibition sponsored by Phase One in Kobe this weekend; you could play with the backs on a set of cameras (Mamiya, mostly, but a Hasselblad too) and there was an exhibition of location portraits of a sort by a Japanese photographer.

The thing is, when I looked closely at the results, they were rather underwhelming. It was as if some step in the process is applying rather aggressive noise reduction even at base sensitivity, completely killing low-contrast, fine detail. Edges look fine and all, but subtle things did not.

The hair of people, especially, would mostly look just fine, but where the detail gets really fine towards the top of the head, it would all completely disappear, and be just a flat brown patch. I would have expected it to sort of fade gently into mottled low-level noise, like it does with normal DSLR-level cameras. This looked more like a really high-resolution P&S, with that characteristic plastic no-noise and nothing-else-either approach. The kind you get with a threshold median filter or similar approach.

I dismissed it as the choice of that particular photographer; he liked his images completely noise free, and damn the fine detail, I assumed. But a couple of days ago, Dejikame Watch (a Japanese site) posts a preview/review of the P40+, and the very first sample image, at iso 50, shows exactly the same approach of zero noise but loss of fine details (in the leafy crowns of trees, in this case). A couple of other base iso images seem to exhibit the exact same thin. Here's the link to the review:

http://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/review/special/20090907_313117.html

So I have to wonder, is this considered the expected and desirable output from these backs? Is it feasible to turn it off, or is it something you'll have to live with? It's almost not visible at all in the portraits.

Alex said...

Hi Drew,
I miss California. Any chance you need an assistant?

And to the previous commenter - I've found that the default levels of noise removal and banding suppression in capture one are way too high, turning them both to zero gives much improved definition in the areas you're talking about.

Anonymous said...

Any chance they might want to run a workshop like that this side of the pond, I wonder? I might have considered a trip to California in October, but have a prior engagement for my Group H driving test ... :-)

Anonymous said...

Drew...you never cease to amaze me.
Thank you for being so open and kind with your knowledge.

G

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