Professor Tips

Photography Through the Lens Cap

A Phase One IQ back on a medium format camera has an extremely large dynamic range allowing you to open up really deep shadows while still retaining the highlight details.

This extraordinary dynamic range makes for really extraordinary photos!

No matter how skilled we are, we all make mistakes and so did I the other day. I was shooting with my favorite lens which is marked with the “focusing sweet spot” and I forgot to remove the lens cap. I noticed it after the first shot, and removed the cap. When I got home, I imported all the images, including the shot with the lens cap still on, to Capture One.

Out of pure curiosity, I tried to see if anything was actually captured in the image with the lens cap. To my big surprise, the extreme IQ180 back had actually captured some information. Naturally, the colors did not look anything like the normal visual spectrum but I still managed to get a quite interesting image with colors that remind me of IR photography. Some heavy noise reductions were needed but then I got this image:

The left image is the original capture shoot with the lens cap still on. To the right is the same image after opening up the shadows in Capture One Pro 6.

The Image Quality Professor
The Image Quality Professor

The digital pioneer, Niels V. Knudsen, is Phase One’s Image Quality Professor and founder of the IQP blog. Moreover, he is responsible for breakthrough advancements in image quality both in Phase One’s medium format camera systems and in Capture One Pro.

Comments (8)

Good April Fools!

Ha, ha haa! Didn’t fool me. Could have, if it was mentioned that the lenscap was made of semi-opaque translucent white plastic!
Cheers for trying.

once i did that with my Nikon without a battery. it happens once a year 😉

Haha, great post! I retweeted, wonder how many more will fall for it 🙂

Tyler klassen

April fools!?

Happy April Fools to all you photo geeks out there 😉