kezia

<p>I'm not an expert on Raw conversion so forgive me if I'm just repeating what you know already. But here is what I see in your first picture:<br>

I feel the problem is with the settings of your Raw software. Most Raw conversion software is set to give a contrasty image at the expense of highlight detail, because most people like the "punch" that gives -- even using "neutral" settings doesn't ensure that you don't lose some of the highlights. That doesn't work so well for contrasty scenes or if you are used to the softer drop-off of highlights in negative film because loss of highlight detail causes highlights to appear 2D and without contouring, and that thrown-away detail cannot be recovered once you have converted the image to Jpg format. So the answer could be as simple as lowering the highlights a little in your Raw conversion software to bring out any detail that exists in the highlights (note the subtle detail in your father's white t-shirt in the scanned image; that is what gives it a "contoured" look and what you are trying to achieve during your Raw conversion). If highlights in the resulting Jpg look a bit grey to start with you can increase the brightness of the white areas a bit in Photoshop. <br>

Another problem could be that if your camera is like my Canon 450D, which is from the same era, then the sensor isn't known for its wide dynamic range, but I do know that using the Raw conversion software I can gain back some of the information lost in the default conversion, even when using the fairly simple Canon software that came with the camera. I also sometimes use a polarising filter to darken highlights a bit at capture, but it doesn't work well in every situation.</p>

<p>Sami,<br>

In DPP just use the save tab when saving the raw and it will save as a raw file with all the changes you made. But in addition, it will also keep the original settings so that you can return to that default mode at any time when you re-open the raw file. Using "save as" and saving as Jpeg will save a separate Jpeg file that will not overwrite your original raw.<br>

Here is what I did when trying to make the Raw vs Jpeg decision. I opened a Raw file in DPP, then I opened the tools menu. On the first screen which deals with the Raw conversion I played with the picture style settings to see what difference they made (the changes mainly involve colour and contrast). Then I opened a file with highlights that were a little too light and played with the highlight slider. Did the same for a file with blocked up shadows (don't overdo it or prints will be greyish and won't have good blacks). Save the file, which will save the Raw with the settings you have just made. Re-open and if you want to see the original, just press the curved arrows to the right of the screen to return to the original, in-camera settings. Play with the white balance on a photo with difficult lighting and see what improvement you can get, and level of sharpening as well. These are all decisions made by your camera during the in-camera Raw conversion to Jpeg process, so can be changed by you at any time afterwards if you have the Raw file, without any degredation to quality, but are set for ever at the original settings if you save only the in-camera Jpeg conversion. Exposure should if possible be got right at the time of shooting because while you can improve a poorly exposed photo even a Raw file will suffer some degredation of quality if changes to exposure have to be made.</p>

<p>To begin with try to restrict yourself to those things that are set during the in-camera Jpeg conversion process to see if they are worthwhile because those are things you can change later from the Raw file wihout any degredation to the file -- white balance, colour balance, sharpening, recovery of some dynamic range, particularly in the highlights. Other things such as exposure settings and focus are already set when the light hits the sensor and before the in-camera Jpeg conversion, so attempts to correct these will degrade even a Raw file so should be got right if possible during the initial exposure in-camera.</p>

<p>One extra point in favour of DPP: it will minimize the extra work you do compared to other programs because the default conversions are identical to the in-camera settings you chose. This is generally not true of programs other than the native Canon software -- the conversions may be close, but they are approximations, not identical. I find I spend much more time tweaking Raw files in Adobe Raw because the Jpeg conversions are not identical to the in-camera ones. You have more choice with Lightroom or Camera Raw, but it can get more complicated. </p>

<p>I second the use of DPP. It allows you to batch convert the pictures with the settings you set in-camera with no knowledge of Raw conversion, so you don't have to spend time in front of a computer if you don't want to. So why would you bother to do that? Well, in addition, it allows you to choose settings for picture style, white balance, sharpness, all very intuitively with the click of a button on the main page (it's like being able to change the film in the camera after the fact). These are also extra settings you didn't have to think about in film days, so it's less stressful knowing you can change them later if you want to. Of course, there are lots of creative things you can do to save badly exposed pictures, or change the colour, b&w conversion etc. but you aren't forced to do any of these things if you aren't interested in them. But for the few pictures you want to choose for large prints, or for a good picture but with detail lost in the shadows, being able to fine-tune adjustments (e.g. sharpness to bring out the finest detail) is really valuable. I live where constant sunlight and harsh shadows are a problem and I often find myself making slight adjustments to bring back colour to washed-out skies or to reveal details lost in the shadows. I also used to have problemswith oversaturated greens in Velvia in the springtime (I wasn't too experienced so I have no idea whether this was a general problem or just me). In digital I can just pull back the saturation of the greens to reveal the detail, because though I find the in-camera Jpeg conversion very good it doesn't always recognize when one colour is nearing saturation point (though this may not be a problem with the 5dII).</p>

<p>You might want to consider first replacing the 17-85 with the 17-55 2.8 IS and then decide which primes you need because most of those you mention would be covered by the range of the 17-55. It is big, but no worse than carrying around four or five primes, and would be a significant improvement on the quality of your 17-85. You may find in the future your choice of primes then changes - for example, the Sigma 30 1.4 for a really fast normal lens (because 2.8 is not that fast for true low light work), or the 60 2.8 macro for macro and portrait work. For myself, I wouldn't see the point of keeping changing lenses between the 24 and 28 2.8 when the range is covered so well by the very good quality 17-55.</p>

<p>The internet is free and an amazing resource, and I use it a lot, but it is also littered with concealed ads posing as consumer opinions and a consensus built on "competitive snobbery". CR gets it wrong quite a lot, but they also occasionally have a way of cutting through a lot of prejudices. Why not rate a swivel lcd + average viewfinder higher than an amazing viewfinder with no swivel lcd? Yes, it's just a single source, one opinion, but also a legitimate argument. I still mourn the loss of some features of my fixed lens Sony 717. It did none of the things a modern compact is supposed to do (such as fit in my pocket - it was an indestructible metal-clad beast). Nor was it a "professional" camera with its small sensor, but the whole lens swivelled, meaning that I could jam the whole camera against a wall as a tripod and swivel the lens while monitoring the composition in the lcd (also useful in small rooms as well). With that camera I learned to use creative angles for my shots and in the street mainly used it at waist level, jammed into my tummy to keep it steady (you can't do that with current swivel lenses; they aren't sturdy enough). Its huge lens was f2 throughout its zoom, and I never worried about not being able to put it in my pocket because unfolded it sat flat against my hip and never got in the way (unlike a regular DSLR carrying a large zoom that sticks out at 90 degrees and has to be constantly protected).<br>

My point is that sources such as CR in the US and Which? in the UK are useful for being able to ignore the in-built assumptions of the enthusiast and professional photographer. They won't always get it right, and certainly can never get it right for everybody, but I don't agree that they are full of manure.<br>

PS We are now on our third Volvo, and although we have loved them all they have without exception all needed some kind of repair every year. Our 17-year-old Toyota Corolla has cost us a couple of hundred euros in all those years of steady driving. And I know, it's one experience and not statistically significant.</p>

<p>Anything I do in Bridge has been by trial and error, so I hope you will get a better response to your question than mine, partly because I am interested too.<br>

I noticed that when I changed something that lost the link to the keywords the words would show in the keywords list in italics (I assume Bridge creates this new keyword so that the link is not lost completely. I found that if I searched by that italicised keyword I could then select all the photos in that list and change the keyword to the original. It's a nuisance, but fixable.<br>

Another thing that annoys me in Bridge is that you can't use more than one word for a keyword. Maybe that's the way all keywording works, but it took me a while to realize that if I used the keyword "garden" then I couldn't use a sub keyword called "My garden" because a search for "My garden" would include all cases with the word garden in it (presumably Bridge searches for anything containing garden). Also you can't use the same sub keyword under different main categories (for example, having a sub keyword "garden" in a different category, such as "Travel", because Bridge doesn't recognize them as different. In other words, the hierarchy of keywords is limited in usefulness.</p>

<p>All Raw files are adjusted in order to be visible onscreen. They contain all the information that hit the sensor (more or less) and the adjustments are what makes the picture visible. The difference is whether the software uses your in-camera settings to display them or some other settings of its own. It sounds as if your software has defaulted to open Raw files in Camera Raw. The problem there is that the default settings for viewing photos in ACR are not the ones you set in-camera (in my version they are more like the camera's "Neutral" setting). But ACR can simulate your in-camera settings (see the Camera Calibration icon). I start there, then know I can tweak the image further (white balance, exposure, regain highlight detail, increase vibrance) without the loss of quality I would get if I changed those things within PS. <br>

On the other hand, if when you open directly into PS your Raw file opens as a Photoshop Object (I think it must do that as Photoshop can't read Raw files without some sort of intervening transformation), then if you are not completely happy with the result, you may still have the option of moving back and forth between PS and ACR to tweak white balance or other factors that if changed in Photoshop would degrade the quality. The advantage is that if you are happy with the result 'as is' then you have by-passed ACR completely, and I can see why you might want to do that if you don't need to make further adjustments. I suspect you can change the Bridge default for opening files in Preferences, or perhaps you can right-click the picture and choose how to open it (I don't have a Mac so I'm not sure).</p>

<p>Ricardo: You seem to be saying that Holdt's choice of camera, flash etc. was a conscious stylistic choice that he felt best suited the subject-matter. You may be right, but I don't think that is what he claims, though I haven't read enough of his writings to be sure.<br>

I am sure that Holdt didn't tell these people that he was going to take pictures with the worst camera he could find, bad lenses, harsh shadows that would make them look older and emphasizes their tiredness. If someone was a guest in a more advantaged household and started to take photos of the occupents in their kitchens while the dirty dishes were still in the sink I would not be surprised to hear them protest loudly and insist on tidying up and brushing their hair first, particularly if they suspected that the photos were to be distributed publicly. Holdt's methods may be justified in order to get his message out, but surely his choice of style is not competely accidental.</p>

<p>I just wondered if there are some on this forum for whom the message is paramount, and the medium, or artistic considerations, of little importance. Should we regret that no one offered to buy Holdt a decent camera before he spent so much of his life documenting the plight of these people? Or would it weaken his message if he had produced a set of beautifully composed, high resolution images?<br>

<a href="http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/index.html">www.american-pictures.com/gallery/index.html</a></p>

<p>What about the new Sony Nex-5? It is so tiny, and with no optical viewfinder, and no flash or mirror noise to make disturb people, the only ways it differs from a p&s are its large sensor and interchangeable lenses.</p>

<p>In Bridge Preferences "output" do you have "preserve embedded colour profile" checked? I'm not sure about this, but if your camera is set to Adobe RGB I think that might cause it to open in Adobe RGB regardless of the settings you put into ACR or Bridge, but I also have problems with the pases of the moon, so I can`t be sure. Did you solve this problem?</p>

<p><img src="../photo/9313833" alt="" /><br>

This one ( <a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/9313833">http://www.photo.net/photo/9313833</a>) is about personal connection. There aren't even any people in it, though some person is implied in the presence of the bicycle. My connection is that I walk past "no go" signs like this every day around the buffer zone through divided Nicosia in Cyprus. Usually I don't bother to take a photo, but I think this time I was attracted to the mixture of lines and angles, none of which seem to be completely horizontal or vertical, and the bike and lights in the background, which sets off in my imagination visions of someone burrowing through the Green Line into the buffer zone and leading some sort of secret existence there, a visual joke of sorts. The problem is I can't really expect anyone else to see all that. And given that it doesn't have immediate impact through strong simple composition or colour it is unlikely that many people will even bother to view it, so I'll never really know whether it has any merit apart from my own personal response to it. Street photography isn't just hard to do well, it's also hard to learn how to improve because mediocre street photography tends not to provoke a critical response of any sort.</p>

<p>Before I start I should explain the following method works for me as an amateur who makes a few dozen prints for friends and family, emails a few more and prints maybe a dozen large prints a year for my own enjoyment. It's not a professional workflow, but my workflow started with the realization that that when viewing your RAW files on screen you are looking not at the RAW file itself but at what the picture would look like if processed with the camera settings that were applied at the time the picture was taken. These settings are saved as metadata inside the RAW file as the default processing. The realization of this has changed my whole approach to RAW files. If I don't like the way the picture looks on screen (e.g. white balance wasn't quite right) I can change those settings in DPP or ACR (or whatever RAW processor you use) and when I press 'done' the new settings will be automatically saved with the RAW file. Not only have I already saved all the tweaked settings even without saving a JPEG or TIFF, but also what I now see on screen is the picture with the new settings in place.<br>

This means that my workflow is to click on my RAW file from within Adobe Bridge, fix white balance and whatever other settings weren't quite right in the original camera settings, click done and amazingly my RAW file now shows the new settings when I view it in Bridge. So I don't bother with JPEG or TIFF unless I want to print the picture. At that point I just click on the RAW file again, save it as a JPEG this time (no further processing needed as I already did that), resize and sharpen in the Photoshop window and print. It only takes a few minutes for the few pictures I want to print. I assign Bridge keywords to the files at the time I download them, and once processed I assign a * to those I like or which have special meaning (e.g.photos of special events), assign a rare ** to the few special photos that I feel might deserve special tweaking and printing in larger size, and a 'reject' to anything with focus or unfixable exposure issues, so now I can filter out the bad ones for things like slideshows and occasionally go through and delete the rejects. I also create 'Collections" within Bridge for special events or subjects (e.g. closeups of flowers, still life, or weddings) as that allows me to keep the number of photos Bridge is dealing with at any one time to a manageable number. Slideshows can be shown on-screen with Bridge using the RAW files with the conversion settings it has saved for me, so I don't convert and take up storage space until I need to. When I do need to save a JPEG I set the RAW conversion to automatically assign the original file name followed by the word 'adjusted' so the converted file can always be matched with its original RAW file in the future if I want to reconvert it.</p>

<p>What about the Canon 60 mm macro?</p>

I agree with John Wall - those stunning safari close-ups you see in National Geographic aren't taken at with 200 mm kit lenses and the professional longer lenses need serious stabilising equipment. You could end up very disappointed with your results. I would take the 18-55 IS kit lens, it really isn't bad.

 

If you want one really sharp prime have you considered the Canon 60 mm f2.8 macro? It's an EF-S lens, so light and small, and quite versatile for portraits, more detailed shots of buildings, flowers, bugs, or even landscapes. I find any of the longer zooms (end even sometimes the 18-55) are quite vulnerable to getting knocked by passersby or doorframes so even though light aren't as comfortable to carry as one might think.

I agree with Ollie - there are several here I like but the second one in the top row has many of the features I would be looking for in an informal portrait of my own child - nicely blurred background to avoid distractions, movement and natural expression, even lighting on the child so no burned out noses or forehead, yet a hint of sunshine in the background to show it was a sunny day. So I would continue with that idea but give her more props to work with - get to know her, find out what interests her and get her doing something. For example in the one of her sitting at the table the table is an attractive prop but I find it a bit static - she is sitting doing nothing, which might work for a studio portrait, but here I feel you want a record of her enjoying her time outside.

Bill, if I get 6 or 7 in a signed rating I assume it's someone who wants me to reciprocate with an equally high rating; if I get the usual two sets of 3s anonymously I assume it's someone who does that to thousands of photos in the hopes of raising their own position in the ratings game. It doesn't seem to matter how good or bad the photo is it gets some ratings at each end of the spectrum. The only ratings I take at all seriously are an anonymous high rating, or a low signed rating accompanied by a thoughtful critique, so I'm for keeping the current system in so far as I care about ratings at all. Just about every variation of the ratings rules has been tried and none works so I just ignore that aspect now. Some of my photos are unedited, unadjusted quick snaps for the benefit of illustrating something in particular to friends and family overseas, and these are unlikely to engage the imagination of anyone else (I have to submit everything for critique because I'm not a paying member), others are photos I would like seriously critiqued, but that doesn't happen, so I have to be content with learning from examining other people's photographs. When I first started posting here several years ago I was quite outspoken but never had a post deleted so I have no complaints on that score. I don't really know how one goes about getting more useful critiques. I can only suggest being selective in those photos that you yourself critique. Find several photographers whose work has something in common with yours and then try to feed them comments that you think they might find useful for a while - critiquing is a good learning exercise in itself and it's harder than you think! You might find some will eventually reciprocate, but you have to have something useful to say yourself; don't just throw out meaningless comments in the hope of getting a response, because the exchanging of meaningless 'bravos' loses its fascination very quickly, and it's probably better not to choose the superstars because they are in such demand already for their critiquing abilities. And don't ignore the other forums because they are full of useful information from good photographers who don't necessarily contribute to the photo critique forum.

Thanks, JDM, for the suggestions and warning. If I go the Canon route I'll have to check out lenses, because I don't think I'll be satisfied with their kit lens. The further I go the more complicated it gets. Still, at least we are at the point now where image quality is not the issue among the cheaper DSLRs that it was a few years ago.

Another example taken outside in full sunlight. This was an early experiment so isn't the greatest photo, but I don't think I could have got as much range of texture (and at the same time lit the cloth behind the jug) with side-on morning or evening light.<div></div>

Natural window light indoors when the sun is too high to shine through the windows is my favourite. I feel I get the most accurate colours at that time as well.<div></div>

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments. The discussion has clarified my thinking a lot and I am now fairly sure that I would not have the patience to deal with the complications of finding adapters etc. that is involved. I have decided to concentrate on finding the DSLR I am most comfortable with and keeping my old lenses on an old film body with some black-and-white film in it. Since I don't use many lenses I'll be spending most of my energy finding the one or two new ones that suit my purposes and that provide the look I want. Since the compactness of my old combination was something I valued I am considering the Olympus E-410 with the 14-54 zoom. I am tempted by the Pentax K10D (for its weather sealing since I live in a high-dust area) but feel it may be too large and heavy for my needs.

I have two favourite lenses that I use on an old Karl Zeiss Jenaflex camera.

The first is a Zeiss Jena 50 mm lens with a bayonet style mount (Practika?).

The second is a Meyer-Optik 30 mm with a screw-in mount that I use with an

adapter. I want to buy a DSLR and though it won't be the deciding factor in my

decision as to which camera to buy, and I do understand that they won't be 30

and 50 mm on a DSLR, it would be nice to know before buying whether either of

these lenses can be used with any modern DSLRs.

I also have a fairly weak tripod and I always use the 10 second timed delay with it to give the camera a chance to settle down after I have pressed the shutter. Don't tell them you've already pressed the shutter or they'll get bored waiting for it to go off.

 

Thanks, Tom, for the sRGB hint.

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