Yes, I absolutely take this point.

No, I mean see colour, the way it will look in a B&W picture. I did not mean see a B&W picture, and infer what the colours were.

Sure.

But suppose they'd had two different chemical processes that had been invented at the same time - one B&W, one colour, both equally available. Do you really think B&W would have caught on, except in the sense that line and charcoal drawings are artistic media in their own right?

For the right subjects, I'd agree that it does - but in the sense that for the right subjects, or for the right mood, it is particularly common for colour to distract, or even create an opposing mood.

I'd keep 'compositional' - because some pictures benefit from B&W, others don't. I think it's entirely dependent on the composition.

I can't accept this analogy, George. Converting colour to B&W is the removal of something that was there, indeed the obscuring of the colours in order to highlight an alternate way of viewing the original.

B&W is not the original. If anything, the analogy is the wrong way round.

Well of course, for anyone that has colour vision, "relating B&W pictures to reality" is something they have to do in order to make sense of them.

The older we are, the more easily we tend to be able to do this, since the more exposure to B&W renditions of reality we've had. I never did any B&W photography, but I grew up with newspapers that had only B&W pictures, and also with a B&W television. Years ago I could watch snooker on a B&W telly and know what the colours were - but no longer.

Nowadays, I tend to view B&W as an artistic device that, among other things, allows the removal of distracting compositional elements, as colours can often be.

I won't deny for a moment that it takes real skill to see colour in B&W, nor indeed that many colour pictures benefit a great deal in an artistic sense from having their colour removed, so that the observer can concentrate on the aspects (texture, pattern etc) of the photographs that the photographer wants to emphasise.

Nor would I for a moment deny the talent, sometimes genius perhaps, of the photographers of old that created amazing works of art and of record, using only shades of grey as their colour palette.

But I still think B&W, as a medium, is an artistic and compositional device.

Often marvellous, yes. Realistic, no.

What, unlike black and white photography generally?

Any chance we could see the colour version of the second one?

Certainly in Firefox (not IE 8 ) there seems to be some auto-resizing going on. Although when I commented here, the resizing was up, not down, and looking at that thread again, seems no longer to be happening. So I'm a bit confused. I wish they'd tell us when they mess with the way pictures are displayed in the forum (apologies if they did, and I missed it).

Letting the browser do it risks the sharpness going completely haywire, so I'd rather post at the size it's supposed to display.

I think the 800px limit could be raised to 850 or 900, but I incline towards having a limit.

A couple from the top of Helvellyn, looking down at Striding Edge on a hot June day, early afternoon:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-007.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-005.jpg[/IMG]

A view of the Grisedale valley, from about half way along Striding Edge:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/163-024.jpg[/IMG]

And the legendary Bowder Stone. Possibly the most over-photographed view in the Lakes:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/165-028-BowderStone.jpg[/IMG]

I remember being incredibly disappointed when I got the prints back from this holiday. I'd been using a rubber lens hood which caused terrible vignetting. Before cropping and contrast-adjustment was possible, the whole lot was basically junk. Now, though, although far from stellar, a surprising amount is salvageable.

I'm *so* not going back to film.

Well there is...

If you push in the lens-release button, and turn the lens a tiny amount, until you lose the aperture readout on the LCD, you don't get a preflash.

Since there's no aperture ring, you can't control the aperture, and the flash goes off at max power.

So it's about as useful as an ash tray on a motor bike.

Yes.

Pre-A series lenses, or an A- (or FA-) series lens not set to A. The pop-up then doesn't emit a pre-flash.

If his film endeavours launch my new scanning business, I maintain that he's perfectly sane