So, @darix and I were chatting yesterday when he sort of casually mentions that it might be interesting to see if we could get a company like lensrentals.com to possibly help the community with image samples to help with raw processing and camera+lens support. Which is an awesome idea!
If you’re not familiar with them, they are a company that rents cameras and lenses (it’s in the name!). They’ve got a huge selection of gear available including most brand-new equipment as it gets released and they often tinker and toy with the gear including doing write-ups, reviews, and posting their test results on the lensrentals blog. Their founder, Roger Cicala, has posted many informative posts over the years (there was a neat one recently about what a camera looked like coming back from Burning Man.
After chatting with @darix a bit I went ahead and reached out to them to see if there might be some interest. We didn’t want to say anything without first seeing if it might even be feasible to possibly do something. I heard back from the founder, Roger, and was interested! He was going to see if they might be able to assign some resources to gathering some files for us to use and wanted to know what would be the priority list of files that would do the most good.
Which brings me to this post. If we had access to a large library of hardware, what would be the most effective things we could ask of the librarian to help broaden/improve our support?
- shooting test charts?
- generating data to feed into dcamprof?
- testing specific body+lens combinations?
- shooting specific settings?
I am deferring to all of the experts here. In particular if folks like @houz, @heckflosse, @Morgan_Hardwood, @Carmelo_DrRaw, @hanatos and others could please chime in and possibly bring in folks from other projects that we don’t have here yet (is bronger here?), that would be awesome!
This is an awesome opportunity for us. Not just the possible ability to get some great data to improve projects with, but also a little more exposure for the community and Free Software to more photographers. I would really like to come back to Roger with some good, pointed requests that (hopefully) won’t be too intrusive to their normal operations. Please chime in!