I’m now 57, and life got in the way about 7 or 8 years ago, so I put the camera away and only took it out to take Christmas card pictures. I recently decided it was time to get it out and start using it again. I had a scare: the external flash still had batteries in it, and it croaked badly. Took everything out, wiped it down, and tossed the camera bag in the trash.
I haven’t done anything serious yet, but I had great fun using my 10mm, holding it about a foot off the ground and chasing my terrier around the backyard. I pushed the ISO to 12800, and every single picture has so much noise as expected. This was late evening with not much light at all.
This is where it gets interesting. Ive been trying to learn Darktable for a couple of weeks, but these pictures tested everything I had learned and then some new stuff as well. They look like the images I had to make in the late 80s, when I used Tri-X 400 and pushed it to 1600. I absolutely LOVE IT. At least I don’t have an editor to deal with.
My camera is a Canon T1i running Magic Lantern. I had my Sigma 10-20mm aspherical lens on it. I realized I purchased that lens in 2005 while I was in the Virgin Islands. That makes it over 20 years old. Wow!
Since COVID, Ive worked from home, and I live in a small town just west of Houston. I don’t get out much. But I want to walk downtown during golden hour soon. Not a whole lot of people, but interesting old buildings to photograph.
Anyway, this was kind of an introduction to myself, since I am new here.
Welcome to the forum. You would learn a few tricks if you shared some of your images as playraw. Then you would see a variety of approaches to using DT and managing noise as well.
OP: You don’t need to share a playraw to learn dt. You could just download one of hundreds playraws we already have and see some of the edits in there too.
Most people like to see what others can do with their images. That is why I suggest a playraw. Of course only those who are interested in playraws need to respond to those posts.
I’ve been hanging around on the forum for a few years now, and have found it one of the best communities I’ve found online, not only for the open source software like darktable (my favorite!) but for photography generally.
Darktable is fantastic, but depending on your mindset and expectations it can be overwhelming too, so don’t be afraid to to take your time and refer to the manual and so on.
A couple of recent new entries into the field of free and open source (FOSS) raw developers are RapidRaw and Safelight, while the well established RawTherapee and its offshoot ART are also great, so you have options if darktable doesn’t suit your workflow.
All these are discussed on here and many of the developers also hang out here so we’re blessed with a wonderfully vibrant group.
Have fun!
P.S. if you enjoy a bit of classic film look, you might be interested in Spektrafilm - a quite new film emulation that actually simulates the chemistry in code. V. cool and awesome results. A module to use it in darktable is under development too.
I was just poking fun at the fact that as soon as someone shows up here everybody (me included) asks whether they’d like to post a playraw. Because that really is a long standing tradition.
Darktable is a fantastic program once you learn the scene-based workflow. IMHO, much better than Lightroom (which I left at 3.3 and put my camera away). I’m an old fart who has been in IT for over 30 years. New doesn’t scare me; not being able to remember it, well, that does.
Tada, my Callie also called “Stinky Troll”. I was running her to expend some of that evening energy. Terriers can be terrors when they don’t get their way.
This was taken with a
Canon T1I
Sigma 10-20mm f4.0-5.6 @ 10mm
F4.0
1/125 shutter
ISO 12800
Scaled to 1080x1080x72 per post I read about jpg size.
Processed with Darktable 5.6.0 to get that extreme Tri-X pushed look.
