Dusty sensors, image flickering and colour calibration

You might be asking – what’s been happening lately, why so slow with the updates? Mostly I’ve been battling a dust problem on the D800’s sensor, and that’s a complete show stopper when you have moving footage. Its even more of a show stopper when your sensor cleaning product makes things even worse (!). I’ve only just received a second sensor cleaning solution from Visible Dust, which has thankfully completely cleaned my sensor, and now the camera is ready to go again.

I’ve also just received a SpyderCheckr Pro which is a large colour calibrator designed to perfectly reproduce colours. It comes with a “Spyder Cube” which is for white balancing. I’m going to be working with someone on creating colour look-up tables to reproduce accurate colours that factor in the neutral density filter’s slight colour cast. This is something I originally thought might be out of my technical reach, so I’m really happy to be moving forward with this!

That’s just a couple of things that I’m working on to make these time-lapses the best quality, cleanest and most accurate possible.

Starting tomorrow I’ll be full swing back into shooting again, and I’ll be trialling a new solution to fix flickering when shooting at f11 (to capture the full dynamic range). Essentially I’ve shoved a small piece of plastic into the aperture controls on the lens to keep it at *exactly* f11 for the whole time lapse. Crossing my fingers that will be a perfect solution! Here’s a post I made a few days ago on the subject: https://www.hyperfocaldesign.com/blog/lens-twisting-to-eliminate-flickering-on-the-d800-sigma-8mm/

Finally I’d love your feedback on 32bit sharpening via this post: https://www.hyperfocaldesign.com/blog/32-bit-sharpening-for-hdri/ If you are a potential end user I’d love to know your opinion – would you like the footage pre-sharpened or unsharpened so you can apply it yourself?

Thanks for following – there’s only one step left now before I can release the sample HDRI footage, and that’s the colour calibration! I appreciate your patience with this!