Amin,

Turn off the expanded dynamic range, probably this is the culprit. I have had the same, and (AFAIK) Alan suggested me to turn it off - it really helped. Previously I used to have noise even at ISO 200. Please, let us know the results then

Ummm, mowers are scary... Remind me the 'Lawnmower man'

But there's a good method to deal with the mower noise. Play some nice thrash / heavy / gothic / speed / power metal louder than that I enjoy the music and don't hear the noise anymore

I tried to go further with cropping:

[IMG]http://i384.photobucket.com/albums/oo284/misiek_knm/PU/imgp1196crop2.jpg[/IMG]

However I'm not convinced if it helped, probably I overdid it

Hi Claudio and welcome

Hi Caz, and welcome

Bob, I'm rather a newbie, but...
1) I like the postprocessed picture more, it's softer, and the lady on the picture looks better (in my opinion). However if you could save her... ermm... blouse? (I never know the names of women's clothes) from it - the texture is lost.
2) It looks a bit overexposed, if you take look at her hand and the child's cheeks and nose. Not sure if you can get a bit more RAW processing?

I'm really a beginner with post-processing, so cannot help much, I'm afraid - you're far superior with that kind of work

And as far as I know, parents are usually happy with they babies' pictures even when not perfect (at least when I think about my family or friends) - if it is a family (home) picture, not a studio, etc. And probably it's worth taking a number of different pictures, preselect and show / offer them on CD, then they can pick what they want to print themselves.

Paul: I also try not to crop if I can avoid it (I think I'm too greedy now, previosly I used 6MP camera and been happy with, now I have > 14MP but still want it all ).
But then the lens was at it's length limit and in the time I approached the tree closer, the rook flew away. And it seemed to me there's too much sky on the picture.

Hmm, that picture has been taken with matrix metering, I should think about spot metering when I took the picture.

Thanks!

Thanks, George

I thought about more aggressive cropping - I felt there's to much sky there, but on the other hand I was afraid that the bird would have too less space to fly I'll give it a try tomorrow (I'm too sleepy by now I'm afraid)

But then, going for wider aperture would cause the flowers being out of focus (#2)? So maybe rather 5.6 than 2.8?
George, about whites blown out - would it help if there is some shadow or the light is not so strong?

Magnolies are beautiful blossoming

It's Friday night, isn't it? Actually I was up to comment the magnolias (and I will)