Official BeyondUnreal Photography Thread

It just looks cut off, when it's mid-limb. Cut off joints look creepy though.

Exactly. Its distracting and takes away from the intended impact of the shot. The eye gravitates towards areas of a person and expect to see certain parts which are not showing. Because they are missing the mind is unable to process what they see as well. It feels off and most people are unable to tell you why.

If you have a bad habit of chopping off limbs... back up a bit and capture more in your shots. Remember, your packing quite a few megapixels. You can crop down to just 4 megapixels and still manage to print an 8x10.

I'm generally not a chopper.. but it does happen to some really great photos in dance and sports. Unless the shot is just phenomenal and you want to sit there and reconstruct the remaining portion of the persons body (which I have had to do).. its best to just move on to other shots.

I usually don't post most of my paid gigs because of privacy concerns, nature of live performances.. and well it just ends up looking like "same old same old" but what the heck. Here we go!

These shots where taken with my 7d at ISO 6400. ..and no they didn't all look this clean and pretty straight out of the camera.

The ISOs! They are high!

Seriously though, awesome shots.

The last pic cracks me up for some reasons. From the blur it looks like someone is crouched and all his upper body is freakin out G-MOD style.

OO7MIKE said:

You can crop down to just 4 megapixels...

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4MP is the starting point for some of us!

6400 ISO? Woa. My camera only goes to 1600, and I hardly ever use that fast an ISO.

Lola Lufnagle said:

6400 ISO? Woa. My camera only goes to 1600, and I hardly ever use that fast an ISO.

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Now you lot are just trying to make me feel miserable!

400 ISO is the limit here.

IronMonkey said:

Now you lot are just trying to make me feel miserable!

400 ISO is the limit here.

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Well that's at least something. Before I got my DSLR, I was using a good for its time point-and-shoot camera. I couldn't modify the ISO or anything though, but it had a lot of different shooting modes, so I could usually shoot things like I wanted. One of my biggest beefs with those point-and-shoot cameras is how you can't shoot in RAW. Many cameras completely obliterate pictures with their terrible JPEG compression. The Olympus I was using wasn't so bad, but it was still noticeable.

Now that I have a DSLR though, I realise that there is much more to photography than I originally knew

edit: welp, just checked out the 7D, that camera is crazy. 18MP, up to 12800 ISO and it can record 1080 video. It's terribly expensive too though. Definitely a pro camera.

Lola Lufnagle said:

edit: welp, just checked out the 7D, that camera is crazy. 18MP, up to 12800 ISO and it can record 1080 video. It's terribly expensive too though. Definitely a pro camera.

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The 18mp are nice but I never give my clients 18mp files. I always give them resized 8mp files. After resizing they look much sharper (real detail not artificially created via sharpening tool) and the salt and pepper noise is less noticeable.

Video is a fun toy but not very useful because of the poor AF the camera has for video. Still, I have fun with it.

7d images at ISO 12800 aren't all that great. It completely kills your dynamic range so image color looks flat. Going to have to wait till I get a 1dmk4 before I can use 12800 and get decent results. Right now the $3500 premium doesn't make much sense for me as these models depreciate at about $900 a year.

The new Canon Digital rebel 550D ($899) uses the same sensor as the 7d. It also borrows a bunch of other features. You may want to look into it if more mp floats your boat. I've seen some sample images and they look very similar to the 7d except at high iso settings.

JohnDoe641 said:

Get a fast f1.8 or 1.4 and you won't have to worry about that. I love my 50mm and 85mm 1.8's. They're so amazing at night time.

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F1.4 wont get you far when you have fast dancers. Lots of out of focus shots at f1.4. I know.. I have tried! Don't get me wrong, I love my 50mm 1.4.

OO7MIKE said:

The new Canon Digital rebel 550D ($899) uses the same sensor as the 7d. It also borrows a bunch of other features. You may want to look into it if more mp floats your boat...F1.4 wont get you far when you have fast dancers. Lots of out of focus shots at f1.4. I know.. I have tried! Don't get me wrong, I love my 50mm 1.4.

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For the size of the sensor on the 7D (APS-ish), aren't you running into diffraction limiting except at the f1.4 end of things?

In other words, more MP won't buy more detail unless the sensor size increases as well.

IronMonkey said:

For the size of the sensor on the 7D (APS-ish), aren't you running into diffraction limiting except at the f1.4 end of things?

In other words, more MP won't buy more detail unless the sensor size increases as well.

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Yes and no.

Lets start from the beginning.
On a digital sensor there are many photo sites or photo sensors. There are 3 photo sites per pixel. Each photo site render a different color. They actually only see in black and white but there is a color filter placed over them so they are more sensitive to specific colors. The camera takes the data from each photo site and then determines the color of that one pixel. If black and white photos where all that we cared about .. we would have 3 times the current resolution.

That’s all good for colors but there is more.
Each photo site has a mini lens over it. The better the quality of the mini lens the more accurate it will be able to render a color. The more accurate the color is the sharper the image looks. But wait.. there is more… We also have something called an AA filter. This filter is placed over the sensor to purposefully degrade the image quality so we do not see Moiré patterns on clothing and other finely detailed objects which often confuses the sensor.

There is a downside to using the AA filter. It degrades the image quality and makes things slightly darker. You are losing about 25% of your cameras resolution because of the filter. There is a science to creating and implementing an excellent AA filter without causing too much image deterioration. These high quality AA filters are often saved for the high end cameras. This is why the 16mp Canon 1Dmk4 camera is able to render much more detail than the 21mp 5dmk2.

So why don’t we just remove the AA filter? Many people have and some camera manufacturers (Leaf, Leica, Kodak, Hasselblad) ship cameras without the filter. For $450 you can have your cameras AA filter removed and a clear piece of glass put in its place. (necessary step to insure other filters are placed at a correct distance from the sensor.)

http://www.maxmax.com/nikon_d700hr.htm
http://www.maxmax.com/nikon_d300HR.htm


As you can see there is a clear benefit to doing it.. but then you may find that there is a horrible disadvantage. It will all depend on the type of photography work you do.

Moiré Hell – It just gets worse as you make the image smaller.


With a sharp enough lens the 7d is able to perform quite well. I will say that if your lens is not up to snuff, any small flaws that you sometimes see become large and noticeable ones in the 7d. For the first time ever.. I have chromatic aberrations on my 70-200mm L. I can always correct them.. but its something I paid good $$ for so I didn’t have to deal with it.

To answer your question directly. Yes, there is diffraction occurring in both the digital sensor and the lens. The resolution of the 7d often outresolves even the best lenses at their sharpest settings. Still there is no denying that the 7d is able to capture more image detail even at f1.4 than a 40d can. Please keep in mind that sensor size (1.6x crop vs Full frame) has some barring on image quality but it isn’t always a conclusive tell all. Strides in technology help so manufacturers are able to create high quality photo sensors.

You can read more about it here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/does.pixel.size.matter/

I had no idea that there was so much to simply the sensor. I thought it was just a matter of pressing more sensor sites into one spot. Thanks for the informative post Mike, really interesting stuff.

I think I prefer my camera with the filter though. I'm taking pictures of pretty much anything, and wouldn't want that crazy Moiré effect to ruin my work

OO7MIKE said:

The resolution of the 7d often outresolves even the best lenses at their sharpest settings.

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I think that was the point I was trying to make (but had been too lazy to work out the size of the Airy disk vis a vis the pixel density for that sensor.

OO7MIKE said:

Still there is no denying that the 7d is able to capture more image detail even at f1.4 than a 40d can.

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Ah! Don't think my question was a criticism of the camera. The 7d very fine camera and would be my choice for a new camera (given how much I would be willing to spend and if I hadn't promised that I'd keep my Powershot G3 for 10 years. Only 3 more years to go!