Hey Bros,
Referring to the shot:
Here are the details of the shot:
Camera Settings: F4 | 1/250 | ISO 200 | 90mm
Equipment:
Camera Body: DSLR-A700
Lens: 70-200mm f2.8 G SSM
Firmware: v04
The 100% crop on the Left is actually the
untouched piece that came straight from the raw converter; the crop one on the Right is a Work In Progress. On this one, I try to clear away the minor blemishes and discolourations of the skin while trying to retain the pores.
This one is actually marked still as a "Work-in-progress" photo, for it's not all finished. There are a lot of things to do to someone's skin, like removing discolourations, major blemishes, blurring, then restore the skin texture, contouring the subject's face, etc - Being part and parcel of the fashion/glamour photography work flow.
The details are in the form of fine pores are quite visible on the skin... you should be able to see the fine hairs on the rim of her nostrils, as well as the silver hairs on the area of skin below the lower lips. Also, the camera is able to render the fine folds of the of skin of her lips properly - All these are both visible on the original and WIP crops.
Anyways, here is another shot from another shoot:
Camera Settings: f2.8 | 1/400 | ISO200 | 120mm
Equipment:
Camera Body: DSLR-A700
Lens: 70-200mm f2.8 G SSM
Firmware: v03
In this one, one should be able to see the double yellow line, As well as someone working with one of the two reflectors, the reflection of her eye lashes in the upper reaches of her eye and, yours truly (who's right in front of the model) in the center of the pupil - one should be able to make out my arms and elbow, as well as the wall I'm propped up against for support. :sweatsm: The eyebrows are blur because they are out of focus due to the shallow Depth of field - but her wrinkles under her eyes are visible.
Well, I'm a RAW shooter - I don't have faith in JPEG, and especially, the current condition of JPEG output engine, and RAW files can be reused and looked upon again as the Raw converters improve, so it's my preferred format... Adding to that, I'm a bit of the self-confessed control-freak, who wants to do a lot of post work on photos.
I'd like to say though I'm rather confident that I would be able to attain a similar quality of work with any system because generally, photo capturing technology (the tool) has developed to a level that I believe that I, the human, have become the actual bottleneck of the workflow.
I think the output of this current tool I'm using is quite adequate for most of my works - which involves photos to the size of S8R. So far, the biggest photo I've developed from the A700 is a 40cm x 50cm print, The sharpness and detail is adequate for blowing up to that size for print.
100% crops would probably start to matter when you are really going huge - and how large you can go - is logically affected by how long a distance your audiences would view your works. For example, if they are viewing your works from the same distance we'd usually read our newspaper, their eyes should be able to resolve somewhere in the region of 72 to 96dpi at around 2 feet. That equates to a print in the region of around 36 inch by 24 inch (thereabouts) for something that's of around 10 effective megapixels, when you go higher in effective resolution, the larger your print can go with that viewing distance.
For curiousity's sake this might be one of the clues why our monitors are a "puny" 72 or 96dpi - At that distance that we normally work our computers from (around 2 ft): If you take an average person with nominal visual acuity (VA of 6/6), our eyes usually can't really separate more detail than around that number (72/96dpi) from usual reading distance (2ft), though this is not always the case, especially for people with healthy eyes, as they'd usually have better than 6/6 vision - and that usually lands in the region of 6/4.8 or 6/3.6 - though usually, we aren't measured beyond that because the test criterion don't demand the opticians to investigate beyond 6/6, which is considered nominal visual acuity. Compared to that of eagles, our eyes are proportionately smaller - if human eyes are of the same ratio in size as that of eagles, they'd be the size of oranges, and the bald eagle has up to 8 times more resolving power than our own, so if we can see 100 lines drawn across a square, they can see 800 lines.
Most of the time, we would probably export a lot of websized photos. I think irregardless of the system, they should be all very capable of delivering more details than what most of us would practically need most of the time. So with that - lands one of the reasons I'm holding off my A900 purchase, though I admit that I'm very poisoned by the number of exposures to the system already... (ahhkssss die sia!) :sweatsm:
I could have started out as a D80 nikon user if my father hadn't bought into the A mount, so I call it fate. As time goes by, I think I've invested quite a sum in it, and it's not good for a poor dude like me to to change systems, so I've pretty much stayed as a A mount user. At one point, I was very poisoned by the Canon 5D + 24-105 F4 as it would have suited most my requirements, but I cannot financially afford the loss of value when I switch systems, so the thing I can only do is to maximise my current tools.
Hope this post answers some of your queries and doubts and hope you'd enjoyed reading it...
Cheers!