paddler4

I don't know. Time will tell. I went back to Gear Patrol today and read more of their material. Their reviews (at least what I saw) aren't at all like DPR's. They seem to be mostly "the 10 best XXX" type, without the detailed list of objective feature-by-feature results that DPR routinely provided. Hopefully, they'll let DPR continue to do what it did.

I had never heard of them either. You can find their description of themselves here: https://www.gearpatrol.com/about/a2281/about/. I noticed that they accept advertisements, and they don't describe policies about independence.

it all depends on what one photographs. My new body, a Canon R6 Mark II, does have loads of features I won't ever use. That doesn't concern me a whit. The point for me is that it has a lot of features I do use, that make it far easier than it used to be for me to capture what I want and decrease substantially how many discards I have. I think about settings that impact the extent to which I succeed in capturing what I want. It's not worrying; it's part of the craft. I did the same with fully manual cameras, but I have lots more options now. I learned in the B&W film days, starting in the late 1960s. My first two SLRs were completely manual, although both did have an internal meter. Since going digital, I've owned an embarrassingly large number of digital cameras with lots of features. I don't think I have ever once used any of them in "auto" or "program" mode. I shoot entirely in manual, aperture priority, or shutter priority mode. I'll give one example of a "whiz-bang" feature that helps me a great deal. I shoot a lot of candids of little kids. Little kids are constantly moving in unpredictable ways. I used to have lots of discards because it was so hard to maintain focus as they moved around. Now I have very few discards. If there is only one kid in the frame, I can tell the camera to use the whole frame for autofocus and to track people. I can then forget about focusing and instead pay attention to composition, capturing the right expression, and settings that matter, like aperture. If there are multiple people, I can set the camera so that if I manually focus on one, it will then track that person anywhere in the frame, focusing on the head if no eyes are visible and the eyes if they are. Having this advantage required that I spend some time learning to use a complex autofocus system. Time very well spent. I'll give one more. Starting all those years ago, I've learned lots of ways to meter in difficult lighting, but the fact is that I sometimes get it wrong. With my old digital cameras, I would have to take a shot and then look at the histogram on the LCD to see whether I needed to add exposure compensation or, if in manual, simply change a setting. Now I can have an RGB histogram in the viewfinder, so I can get the same information while I'm composing the shot. Very helpful. Are there lots of people who buy fancy cameras and don't really have a use for them? I assume so.

might help to show a photo of what you are describing

Thanks for posting the solution. Good to know for future work

I had a similar problem some time ago: some of the new features introduced in a previous version didn't work because of the graphics card in my old computer. I made the same decision: I replaced the system, which was about 5 years old. Everything has been fine since.

I assume "CD" refers to a measure used for brightness, candelas per square meter. That's the cd/m^2 in Alan's post. For general purpose viewing, set it however bright you like. For photo editing, most people recommend fairly dim, say, 80 to 120 cd/m^2, but IMHO, there isn't one ideal level, as it depends in part on the level of ambient light. The key is to set a level that makes your prints look roughly as bright as the screen. When people complain that their prints are too dark, what that usually means is that their monitor is too bright for photo editing.

Yes, this makes sense. When a severely underexposed area is left dark, you can’t see the noise. When you brighten that area, there isn’t much signal to amplify, so you end up brightening the noise enough to be apparent

I don't think that's a good analogy. The reason we often see noise in high-ISO images is that the amplification entailed in raising ISO makes the noise visually more apparent. Since there isn't much signal, there isn't much to obscure it as it's amplified. Often, we don't notice some sorts of background noise because other, louder noises during the daytime obscure them. Now suppose that at night, you amplified the total noise in your environment to the same decibel level you normally have during the daytime. That's analogous to raising ISO. The background noise would be very apparent.

And I changed my mind anyway and bought an R6 Mark II. I've found all sorts of ways that it's been a big step up. And the fabulous AF is great for candids of kids, which I do a lot.

Yes, the DR captured by the camera is compressed to a narrower range when printing. And yes, a loss of contrast is a common phenomenon, depending on the type of paper. It's most severe with matte and fine art papers and least severe with glossy and metallic papers, to overgeneralize. I print most often on either luster or baryta papers, which don't lose too much contrast, but I often end up increasing contrast a small amount when softproofing. One has to be careful doing that because that boost will compress the tails of the distribution, and in the case of some images, you can lose shadow or highlight detail.

ISO values lower than base ISO aren't true ISO values, and there are drawbacks to using them--reduced dynamic range and a risk of clipping. The best bet, if base ISO isn't slow enough, is an ND filter. One current camera, the OM Systems OM-1, emulates an ND filter with firmware, but I have no idea how that works or how good the results are.

yes, you can use a smaller swab. I use one that I purchased for APS-C on my FF bodies. The brand I bought is out of business, unfortunately. My procedure is: 1. Start with a rocket blower, with the lens opening pointing down. 2. If that isn't sufficient, I use a static brush, a cheaper substitute for the Arctic Butterfly. 3. Only if both of those fail, I swab.

Another thing to be wary of with ND filters is color casts. As one would expect, these tend to be worse with denser (darker) filters. In my limited experience, the severity of the color cast is not well correlated with price. Some expensive and well regarded filter manufacturers produce NDs with pronounced color casts. These color distortions are not always easy to get rid of in post. I had a very ugly interchange with one expensive manufacturer to which I will give the unwarranted courtesy of leaving unnamed. I bought one of their expensive NDs and tested it. I found a distinct color cast. I emailed them the photos (photos of white paper under identical conditions) to show the problem. Initially, one of their staff replied, saying that my evaluation was not "technical" and that they consider only technical reviews. When I persisted, I got a nasty note from the head of the company saying that they can't be bothered by the complaints of a nobody like me. It's been years since I bought mine, but at the time, I found Marumi NDs at lower and mid densities to be very good. For a 10-stop, I found the Hoya pro as neutral as anything I could find. But again, that was years ago. My recollection is that I was able to find reviews that discussed this for particular filters.

To resolve Alfred's question: for a given level of final image brightness, lower exposure means more noise. The base of all of this is that most noise sources are unaffected by exposure. For all practical purposes, you can treat their sum as a constant. Signal is variable: it depends on exposure. So it's unavoidable: if you drop the amount of signal, you decrease the signal to noise ratio. If you leave an underexposed image dark, you may not notice this. But as you brighten the image, you amplify both signal and noise, and as a result, the underexposed image has more apparent noise. There is no avoiding this, and ISO invariance has no relevance except as guidance for how to minimize the issue. On my old Canon bodies, I was better off raising ISO for the first few stops than brightening in post. That's not true of an ISO invariant camera. One corollary of this, which Dog has stressed, is that to minimize noise under any circumstances, the key is attending to proper exposure. All I would add is that as underexposure gets more severe, this attention to proper exposure becomes even more important because of the simple math of the signal:noise ratio. I had a test series years ago in which I shot with the original 7D, a camera that gets noisy fast. I took repeated shots of a scene with only modest DR, so there was room for variation in exposure without clipping. I showed that even with that camera, one could underexpose by a number of stops without serious noise problems as long as one exposes to the right, that is, as long as one maximizes signal strength.

Dog did not show that ISO invariance is a myth. The post he debunked confused ISO invariance with the assertion he did debunk, which is that with an ISO-invariant camera, underexposure doesn't increase noise. It does, as it does with all digital cameras. ISO invariance means only that the impact of amplification in camera (boosting ISO) and of amplification in post are similar, so there is no reason to bump ISO in camera. Most ISO-non-invariant cameras produce less noise boosting ISO in camera (up to several stops) than boosting an underexposed image in post. This doesn't alter that reducing exposure reduces the signal:noise ratio and therefore increases visible noise. This latter is what Dog demonstrated concretely.

Keep in mind that focusing is extremely tough in macro work because of the tiny depth of field. A common way that macro photographers deal with this is to focus the camera at the distance they want and the move the camera slightly backwards and forwards, often on a monopod, to try to achieve focus, while focusing your eye on the bug's eye. This is what I do most of the time. Unless you are VERY steady, you have to accept a very high failure rate. Even though I've been doing this for years, I throw out the vast majority of my captures. I sometimes come home without a single usable image. The heavier the equipment and the more out of balance it is (for example, from an off camera diffused flash), the harder it is to do this.

Nope. I don't even use my full frame for bug macros. I usually use an APS-C. Bugs don't stay put. It's very difficult to get in position and focused in time, even with a smaller camera. Having a diffused flash makes it even harder. I would also never consider film for bug macros. The number of keepers is quite small. At least, mine is. Minute problems of focus, moving plants, etc., mess up many images. I consider it a good day if I take 80 or 100 shots and get 2 keepers. No cost other than time: I just format the cards and start again. A key variable in macro is pixel density. Magnification is independent of sensor size. So if you have a 1x .3 cm bug at 1:1 magnification, that 0.3 cm^2 is all you get on the sensor. That's another reason I use a smaller-sensor camera for bugs: greater pixel density. This image was captured with an 18 MP APS-C camera (first generation Canon 7D), with a 100mm lens and 36mm extension tube for greater magnification.

But at least cheaper than the R5...

I print up to 17 x 22, so in rare cases, if I have to crop substantially, more pixels would be a minor improvement. However, I'm not sure it's worth the costs, both financial and otherwise. I got used to an EVF using a tiny Lumix LX-100, so I suspect that the vastly better EVF on the R6 II would be just fine for me. I'd be switching from a 5D IV, so I would save a little weight, but not much, and I would lose about 6 MP.

On an unrelated topic: how do you like your R6 II? I'm tottering on the edge of ordering one. I would have preferred slightly higher resolution, say 30 MP, but apart from that, it looks like a truly superb camera.

This quote seems to conflate two things. One is ISO invariance. If I understand right, ISO invariance has nothing to do with the impact of exposure per se; it is a comparison between amplification in camera (setting a higher ISO) and amplification in post (brightening the image). An ISO-invariant camera is one for which the two types of amplification produce essentially identical results. (A tangent: I don't know about the R6, but many Canon cameras aren't ISO invariant. Mine isn't.) The second is the impact of exposure, independent of amplification. For this question, the quote--where did it come from?--is simply wrong. The effect of lowering exposure is to lower the amount of signal but not the amount of read or amplification noise. So, underexposing results in noise being a higher percentage of the total output. That seems to be what your comparison shows. Think about limiting conditions. As one approaches a black frame--no signal at all--the image approaches nothing but noise. As one increases signal by increasing exposure, that noise necessarily becomes a smaller proportion of the whole. That's the physics. I no longer have them, but some years ago I created a series of images to illustrate this, using them to illustrate the fact that the way to minimize the appearance of noise in high-ISO shots is to expose to the right, maximizing signal relative to the constant (apart from random variation) amount of noise.

Canon EF lenses generally work well with R mirrorless bodies, using one of the Canon adapters

$20 for a pocket-sized spectrally neutral card that can be used to set white balance, white point, or black point: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/768395-REG/WhiBal_WB7_PC_G7_White_Balance_Pocket.html. I've used one for years. The gray scale, however, is another matter.

As someone who does drone photography, I am pleased that some parks ban them. Many people go to parks for peace and quiet, not to hear they high-pitched whine of drones. However, still photography in a parking garage is an entirely different matter, as it doesn't interfere with what other users do unless you take photos of people or their personal possessions.