tjfuss

<p>Color me green with envy. I'm shivering in the snow.</p>

<p>Ben: is that an orange peel?<br>

John: there is glass (more than one piece) involved but the ripples are not glass!</p>

<p>John's looks like some kind of lichen or mineral deposits.</p>

<p>I'll play... (provided I can get the image to post properly)</p>

<div></div>

<p>I'll add my kudos for MPix. Most of the results have been excellent and on the rare occasions with color balance issues, they made it right VERY quickly.</p>

<p>The channel mixer allows you to map the brightness of parts of the converted B&W image based on the color content of the original. In CS4 one may adjust reds, yellows, greens, blues, cyans and magentas independently.</p>

<p>Without the channel mixer, it's going to be tougher to get good B&W results. The options would be dodging & burning as you've desribed - a Wacon pen & tablet are indispensible for those operations. To go a step further, shoot with the camera in B&W mode if it has one and use filters in front of the lens just as in the good old days with B&W film.</p>

<p>Your original post mentions no available light but the sample links show a very large bank of windows letting in daylight. The windows add the complication of matching exposure to the outside world so that it's not blown out or underexposed.</p>

<p>Luka, the approach to conversion to B&W in PhotoShop will depend on the version you're using. Just comparing the two versions I have (CS2 & CS4), they can each accomplish the conversion through the channel mixer but CS4 allows a much greater degree of control. I find the less flexible channel mixer in CS2 preferable to simply desaturating with the hue/saturation control.</p>

<p>Good answers here and Hal's described it well. If you want to see it in diagrams, get ahold of a copy of Light Science & Magic. I checked a copy out of the library after reading about it in another thread here and now I'm going to order my own copy to keep. It's<em> that</em> good.</p>

<p>There's a couple of points on which we can certainly agree. No doubt PUFs could be improved. The notions of increased power and control are excellent but what is the real cost in terms of price and size?</p>

<p>I agree completely that the 5Dmk2 feature set was a marketing decision but I don't equate that with complacency. It's just the realities of the marketplace. Someone had to decide exactly which features would be included given a certain physical envelope and price point. It's possible that the inclusion of a powerful PUF in the 5Dmk2 would lift the price point so much that the sales estimates would drop considerably.</p>

<p>Sure I take a burn when when you label the engineers as lazy. I've got no problem with being trumped with credentials but my reality is that I've been party to exactly these kinds of design tradeoffs.</p>

<p>Lazy engineering Hal? Gimme a break! Making the on-camera flash <em>smaller</em> and more powerful and more flexible (bounce/swivel) are conflicting requirements. Sure, there's always progress in miniaturizing components but there are some basic physics at work. More power means a larger flash cap. Period. There's no getting around it no matter how industrious the engineer is.<br>

Have you actually designed a camera? Didn't think so. I have... several (twenty four years in camera design at Kodak). Sure, they were much simpler than Canon's models but the same basic physics apply. Mechanisms require parts and parts require space.<br>

So we arrive at the beauty of having many models in the product line: the customer chooses the model with the best match to their particular requirements. A model with every possible desirable feature would require a truck to move and would be immediately condemned for costing too much.<br>

Getting back to the original question, I don't miss the on-camera flash at all when using my 5Dmk2. I hardly ever used it on the 20D, preferring to use the 580 EX or available light or studio flash or a variety of off-camera strobes. ANYTHING but that harsh, weak red-eye inducing pop-up. But that's just me.</p>

<p>Not a lot of time for shooting for fun right now (business has been good) but when I'm not firing away with the Canon 5Dmk2 I like to pull out the Leica M6. Next up will be the Bronica SQAi.<br>

I can't put film through all of them though... I'm cleaning up a lovely Spotmatic, a superb OM1n MD and a really nice SRT101 that are destined for fleabay.</p>

<p>Leica M6 w/ 35mm Summicron<br /><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/10433680-md.jpg" alt="" width="680" height="453" /><br>

Beach distorted through a glass block wall.</p>