This is a cropped photograph of an ageratum the small perennial shrub variety. Its remarkable in as much as the ageratum is quite hard to photograph and get the colour right both digitally and even more so with film. The camera a Sigma DP2M also a remarkable camera because of its Foveon sensor. I have been playing with this camera for a little over a month and thus far I have learned that in day light the images are gob smackingly brilliant at 100 ISO and okay up to 400 ISO above that the IQ gets worse the higher the ISO. But like Armin Sabet  who runs Serious Compacts discovered this camera is quirky Armin found that images shot at ISO1600 could be manipulated in Pro Photo and get reasonable mono images. Well I wanted to try this but Sigma must have changed the ProPhoto significantly with the most current version 5.5.2 and now there is no channel controls. I feel the same can be done in Irident Developer but I haven’t had the time to really do it justice yet, promising but not quite yet. Anyway my thoughts drifted around to colour and the fairly well documented Ageratum effect. I had to prune my little shrub and in the process had some flowers left so as one does I stuck them in a pot and set them on the kitchen table. My kitchen lights are LED down lights so I did a custom WB and fired off a couple of frames and then processed them – utter rubbish, colour bleached out and a horrid NHS hospital green background that was supposed to be white. Tried it again with a flat panel fluorescent light not as bad but still pretty awful. I use flash but most of my work is outdoors so the Speedlight tend to stay packed away. The first few frames with flash WB were better yet so I started to adjust the WB to see what happened The position after flash is fluorescent the first couple of frames were under exposed so I cranked up the ISO to the unusable ISO1600 and this was the result I repeated it just to make sure. Not only is the colour almost accurate but there is not that much noise and this was shot at 1/640s  @ ƒ16 via a wireless trigger designed for Canon I have done almost no PS work on this image… Quirky little camera the DP2M.

A few days later

Update: I had a few problems with Sigma Photo Pro it crashed every fourth or fifth image load. on my Mac Mini and won’t even load on my MBA, There doesn’t seem to be anyway to actually contact Sigma about these issues so it of to the Australian distributor! However I uninstalled Photo Pro and reinstalled and begorrah I have a new monochrome menu in Photo Pro with channels

Above 100% Crop and below the Exif data