Retro Reworking: Pembrokeshire & Brecon Beacons, South Wales, Autumn, 2018
I think we’re due a break after the year we’ve had.
Happily Lisabet and I was able to book our usual two-week September/October break. Where to go this year?
We felt that Scotland, as much as we dearly love the country, would prove too costly with 2022 petrol prices. What about Wales? It’s been a good while since we’ve visited, moreso since we’ve been to South Wales in particular.
South Wales it is, then!
Until that glorious day, I decided to see if I could:
Find my old South Wales photos from 2018, and;
Convert and/or reprocess them.
Point 1 was a success, and I was able to retrieve them from one of my old external hard drives. The issue? This was the period when I was shooting with the beautiful Sigma dp0 Quattro, which produces RAW files (X3F and X3I) that barely any software can read. On the machine I use these days, a 4th-gen 12.9” iPad Pro, I quickly suspected there’d be no way I could read these files.
Thankfully, I wasn’t quite right.
It’s true I can’t read X3I files on an iPad. These RAW files are made using Sigma’s SFD (Super Fine Detail) mode, where the camera automatically exposes seven frames and merges them into a single super high quality RAW file. Only Sigma Photo Pro can read these files, on Mac and Windows.
However, the frankly fantastic Affinity Photo for iPad can read Sigma’s normal X3F files. During my 2018 exploration around South Wales I, unfortunately, shot mostly in SFD mode (X3I files), as I was still very much at the tail end of my HDR phase.
I do still have some singular X3F files, though, and these I’ve been able to convert in Affinity Photo for iPad and go through my current workflow.
So… until I’m in glorious South Wales again, enjoy these reworked photos from my 2018 trip! They were all shot using my camera at the time, a Sigma dp0 Quattro with a fixed 14mm f/4.0 lens. Converted in Affinity Photo for iPad, developed in RNI Films, and finished off again in Affinity.
See my 2018 HDR-esque Pembrokeshire work on Unsplash.
