Sigma SD1 | Winter Mornings

(click on images for larger versions)

Although I appreciate how most people hate the winter, hate the short days, hate the lack of light and the cold temperatures, for me as a photographer there are numerous benefits. For a start, I don’t need to get out of bed so early to see a sunrise or to catch the mist before it burns off. Then there’s the low sun angle, creating deep shadows and casting a pale golden light on the landscape. And of course with the cold temperatures comes mist, dew, frost and ice.

In this blog post I am sharing some images I very recently shot with the Sigma SD1. The SD1 is a DSLR camera I used to shoot with almost exclusively about 8 years ago, both for my own images as well as commercially. At the time it had unrivalled clarity and detail compared to the competition in the DSLR market.

These days the SD1 is a camera for collectors or enthusiasts who appreciate the image output from the camera’s Foveon sensor. And I guess, it is also for people like me who once in a while like to take a trip down memory lane and try out a camera that was so much part of my photographic life for a while.

As I have mentioned in other posts on the SD1, it is an incredibly slow camera to operate compared to modern cameras and even to the other DSLRs that were on the market at the time it was released. The foveon sensor generates a huge amount of data (three times more than an equivalent bayer sensor) and that data needs to be processed and stored on slow media.

So shooting with an SD1 requires a lot of patience, you decide sparingly when to press the shutter button. In many respects it feels like shooting with a medium format film camera and for me this is a good feeling, certainly contemplative, and almost meditative. It’s not for every time I need to reach for a camera but it nice to shoot the SD1 on cold winter mornings when walking my dog.

A lot of the images here in this post were shot into the low sun, this can lead to some whacky results and out-of-this world colours with a foveon sensor. But I think, if you do not need absolute reaslism, then the results look quite artistic.

The lens was the same for all the shots – the 70mm f/2.8 DG Macro. It’s a very sharp lens and has a focal length equivalent to 105mm on full frame.