The Capturing Capital Of Culture

Paul McMullin gets to work in The Capital of Culture using 5x4, Nikon D3, Nikon D2x, and Digital Hasselblads along the way. McNamee acts as bag carrier!

Technical Comparison

Our first comparison is from the top of the Liverpool Cathedral. It was not possible to arrange all the shots to cover an identical field area, we shot on 80mm with the Hasselblads and 105mm with the Nikon D3. The relevant data are as follows:

From each shot we took an 800 x 600 pixel clip for comparison and combined them into a single file. The curved roofs of corrugated cladding are a searching test for colour moiré fringing, which occurs at significant levels in both the Hasselblads but not in the D3. Overall the CVF performance was not up to the standard of the Nikon D3 in this particular shot although we found the result closer in others.

We compared the H3D and the D3 more closely. In the annotated composite the following remarks are pertinent:

A: The detail of the corrugated roof is obscured by the moiré fringing of the H3D.

B: There is spurious resolution of the railings, inferring that the gate has slanted rather than vertical rails.

C: The date ‘1855’ has more detail in the H3D shot.

D: There is significant colour fringing in the trees of the H3D image, similar noise is also present in the surface of the river.

Overall from this test it is obvious that pixel for pixel, the D3 is handling moiré better than the H3D. However, that is only part of the story. The H3D covers almost twice the field area of the D3 in this shot and given that the resolving power in the shots is similar, the H3D comes out well on top (see opposite). This is further illustrated by the detail from the signs on the hoarding around the construction site. The word KIRK is visibly poorer from the D3and the words ‘Banfield Construction’ can be read in the H3D image but not in that from the D3.

In these tests then the evidence says that there is a detectable improvement in the resolving power from the Hasselblad images even though the colour fringing could be a source of problems for say a fashion shoot involving checked or tartan materials.

The Software The Hasselblads come with FlexColor (we used version 4.7.1). This presented us with a proxy, lower-resolution image to review in under two seconds. The loupe facility allows the user to review four segments of the image at full resolution while adjusting critical parameters such as sharpness and noise control. Colour correction is made on the low resolution proxy image. The colour correction facilities are extensive and easy to use. Once the correction had been applied, we saved out a 112Mb TIFF file in 1m 38s to create a 7210x5400 pixel RGB, 8-bit file.

Page 1 - Page 2

Photo Quote: If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry. - Ruth Bernhard