Adopting Foveon

Back in 2002, as an experiment, I bought my first digital camera, the Minolta F100. And just after taking the first batch of pictures I realized the analog era was over. The mix of quality and flexibility of digital photography surprised me at that time. I have never taken an analog photo anymore. Ten years later, in 2012, as an experiment, I bought the Sigma DP1M, a Foveon - based compact camera. And just after taking the first batch of pictures I realized the classic Bayer - based digital photography might be coming to an end...

I explained the difference between Bayer and Foveon many times. My Polish friends may refer to the 2007 article in Computerworld: http://www.computerworld.pl/artykuly/56408/Technologia.fundamentalnie.lepsza.html. Also here on this blog there are a number of posts on Foveon, notably the two: http://headworx.slupik.com/2007/02/x3-digital-film.html and http://headworx.slupik.com/2013/01/merrill.html.

The Sigma DP1M has many drawbacks. No optical viewfinder (there is an optional OVF, but it is useless when I use a CPL filter...), poor battery life, slow autofocus, ... BUT the quality of photos is worth all those troubles. The problem with the Sigma is the more photos you take with it, the less you are open to accept photos taken with other cameras.

I've spent part of this weekend trying to fully adopt the Sigma DP1M: promoting it from my secondary camera to my primary camera. I tried to solve the three issues:

1. Using GPS coordinates to geotag the photos. Since 2007 (this was when I bought the Fuji S5-Pro DSLR) all my photos were taken with GPS plugged into the camera. I really really like viewing them on a map and the lack of GPS option for Sigma was one of the dealbreakers. Was, but no longer is. The solution is very straightforward: use a smartphone as a source of GPS coordinates. There is a very nice Android app called Google My Tracks. It has many nice options and one of them is GPX file export. Then there is the little GPicSync utility. It takes the GPX track record and injects geotags into the JPEG files. I've tested the entire process of taking X3F RAWs with the Sigma, exporting the adjusted / corrected photos as JPEGs and running them through the GPicSync. Everything works.

2+3: Browsing photos on a tablet (the Nexus 10) and making a backup copy on the go. The Sigma saves photos as X3F RAW files. This file format can only be processed by the heavy Sigma Photo Pro software. But there is an option in the camera to save the photos as RAW+JPEG. In this case two files are created: the RAW for further heavy post processing and a JPEG, which is adequate for viewing. But the question was how to copy the files from an SD card over to the Nexus (it does not have a slot, nor it accepts USB OTG SD card readers). Again, the phone to the rescue! Using a USB OTG ("On-The-Go", which means "host") cable I successfully connected a small combo USB + SD reader to the phone. The SD card appeared as /storage/UsbDriveA and the pendrive as /storage/UsbDriveB. Using my phone I could back up files form the SD card to the pendrive. Later I plugged the same USB OTG cable (with the pendrive holding copies of the photos) to the Nexus tablet and launched the Nexus Media Importer app. It mounted the pendrive holding backup copies of the photos and let me view all of them. Good bye all the expensive photo data banks! All I need now is a USB drive and a phone!

The bottom line here is, a smartphone really becomes smart and multifunctional, replacing many dedicated devices. It has become smart enough to let me travel on vacations, leaving my laptop, and many other devices at home. Now the phone is my GPS navigation system, my GPS photo-tagging device, and my photo backup databank. I like traveling light, and this Summer my backpack may be the lightest in many years, when I leave my laptop and my heavy DSLR photo gear at home, losing none of the functionality I used to have before.