If you mean me Matt, then you're wrong! What the matter with you lately???

Dan

A quote from this website:

"At body temperature, the exhaled breath contains air, carbon dioxide, acetone, and other gases resulting from metabolism or inhaled pollutants. The breath also contains tiny droplets of fluid containing water, bits of proteins, DNA, and cell particles shed by the airways in the lungs. When we breathe out onto a cold surface, the water vapor condenses and captures the gases and particles. The resulting fluid is called EBC, or exhaled breath condensate. It can be collected and used as a diagnostic tool much like urine or blood."

Might be fine, but it's not pure water.

Dan

This sort of 'photoshopping' is, to me, no different from using a particular type of film. I mostly used Velvia for its rich, saturated colours (especially greens), others might have chosen Kodachrome for its more muted, 'natural' tones. Boosting contrast, saturation etc, is not what most people would consider 'photoshopping', unless I'm wrong. I do all this at the raw processing stage anyway.

That wasn't how I took Chris's comment. I read it as meaning it's only a 'bad photo' in the sense that technically it's got its faults, and the casual observer could say "that's a bad photo", in a limted and unhelpful sense. To you, it's got meaning and captures what you saw at the time, so you can think of it as a good photo, or at least not a bad one.

As far as the original question is concerned, I occassionally clone out a small distraction, will always change the contrast, saturation etc (if I were shooting jpegs then I would alter these in camera before taking the shots, with perhaps a few tweaks in photoshop), sometimes create panoramic shots from several images and often use photoshop for creating posters and leaflets etc, so plenty of 'manipulation' there.

As I've said before, shoddily done photoshopping can easily ruin a picture for me. If a sky or background has been changed, it's often nearly done right, but there's a tell-tale fault which will spoil it (for me anyway). If you're going to do something like that, you need to spend a long time getting it right. My general feeling is "B*gger that for a lark!"

Dan

Dan

Perhaps you should have gone for the Sigma.

Dan

P.S. I'm surprised nobody's commented on the pic I uploaded, especially in comparison to Richard Day's example.

I always think about macro shots! It's a great lens, have fun.

Dan

Couldn't find the old thread I mentioned, but I've uploaded a pic taken from Edinburgh Castle overlooking the city. It's about 4.8Mb, and can be found here.

The lens was focused on the sign, which was about 1m away I would think. Aperture was f/8, lens was at 10mm. I'll leave you to make up your own minds about the image quality.

Dan

Well, I'm happy to say my copy of this lens produces far better results than that! Are you sure it wasn't shot with a lensbaby?

I would say that my 10-20 is equal in image quality to my 16-45.

I'll have a look to see what shots I have to compare. Thinking of a view out over Edinburgh from the castle...

I've also posted examples on here before, I'll have a search for them.

Dan

P.S. Will also put in bug report for the way this deals with links seeping out of the quote box.

I've used in-camera processing a few times, not lots, but a few. I always shoot raw, and occasionally the situation has arisen where I need to email a low res jpeg of one of those shots to someone, when I've only had a basic PC to use (i.e. no raw converter loaded). In-camera processing has done the trick.

Face detection is autofocus that looks for, and focuses on, faces. Handy at parties and the like, when the user is too drunk to pick a focus point...

Dan

Ah, well, when writing HTML code, you use < !-- followed by a closing -- > (again, without the spaces ) to add comments into the code which aren't actually shown in the page when it's rendered in a browser. It's handy to use so that you can keep track of what the code refers to.

Apparently there are plenty of combinations of < and other characters that produce the same result.

Dan