EDIT: First test was actually about an hour just before opening time. Peter, the photographer on these pictures was kind and showed me how things worked in his studio. This was the first of September.
I’ve been working in one of the model studios here in Gothenburg. The kind of studio where anyone can come, get pro make up and pro photographed. I went there in the hope that they would have some pro-gear for me – No, I had to use my own gear. That would be SD14. Well, that’s cool if I can sit down with each RAW (I saw a potential problem directly, what software did they use?!) but in a studio such as this – Raw is not an option and spend time with each shot is not an option either.
So I was, to be honest, scared how my SD14 would take this. I asked to have a couple of hours in the studio together with another photographer to see if my gear could cope with the work flow. Each shot had to be perfectly made in camera (lightning, contrast, colors, framing) – no adjustments would be made before showing customer. Would you agree to anything like this if you owned a SD14? I wouldn’t, but I was VERY curious and I came with a bag full of lenses (thinking that what I lack in out-off-camera IQ I got in cool looking gear). Oh well.
Day one I tried with WB card and fighting with internal settings for saturation, contrast, sharpness and so on.. (stuff I never really looked at before). Owning an SD since 2002 I NEVER took a jpg for anything else than pure test. I was very dissatisfied, and my grey-card didn’t make me happy. Stuff looked too warm and not very appealing.
Jpeg shots straight out of SD14, no adjustments made in LR. WB card used except on photos with odd color tone. Those have flash, cloudy, incandescent WB settings. Had to see what was possible.
I came home from day one with lots of shots on my CF – but nothing looked really good. I had to readjust colors on most shots using iphoto or Lightroom. I was really not feeling good and I was thinking about buying some cheap Canon / Nikon just to be able to do shoots like this one.
About a week later the owner of the studio called me, asking if I thought I could work one day. I needed the money, prayed and said Yes, no problem. I’ll do it.