I found the discussion around getting decent B&W images out of the DSLR on the recent IR thread interesting and it's been making me experiment more with the different techniques. I'd be interested to hear how other folks are going about though, and how those techniques look in the final B&W image.

Here's a colour image I took recently (nothing special - just a holiday snap):




And here's my current best effort at a B&W conversion:




Anyone fancy having a go at doing a better job and explaining the technique they've used?

Regards
Steve

I haven't quite made up my mind about selling my ATX-Pro 20-35mm F2.8 as I'm still hoping Pentax will go full-frame at some point.

I've had no flare problems with the Sigma either. I've plenty of Pentax lenses to compare it with and it's not noticeably worse than any of them. I've also not had any CA problems with it either.

I've been very impressed with it. It's very sharp, especially at the widest setting and F8 or F11, the AF is good (not that AF is ever really a problem with lenses this wide) as is the build quality. For the cash it's excellent value. The Pentax 12-24 looks a good lens too, but it's nearly double the price. I've not seen any direct reviews between the two lenses however in the reviews I have read the Sigma is at least as sharp as the Canon & Nikon equivalents so I doubt the Pentax would be noticeably better.

Not quite a direct answer however I've got the Tokina 20-35mm F2.8 and I've also found it not really wide enough on an APS-C DSLR. The 16-45 will be considerably better (effectively 24mm at the wide end instead of 30mm) however a lot depends on how much use you made of your 20-35 at the wide end when used on film bodies.

I almost bought the 16-45 (and I still probably will) however as I tended to use the wide end of my 20-35 most I bought a Sigma 10-20mm instead as it's effectively a 15-30mm when used on my DSLR.

I tried the various macro options etc. but the results were never much good. I did have a film scanner (a Minolta) however it hadn't been used for a while as it's not compatible with Windows XP. I looked the various options for getting a replacement but in the end it was much cheaper to just put together a seperate Windows NT PC, stick it on my home network and use that for scanning before transferring the results to my main PC for post-processing.

There are lots of film scanners on Ebay that don't work with XP and usually they're pretty cheap. My Minolta Dimage, despite being some 10 years old, is still very effective and capable of producing results which are as good (and in some ways better) than anything I can get from my DSLR.

Given the market that Pentax sell 35mm film SLR's and DSLR's into then I'd expect that only a small number of the F2.8 long primes and zooms are sold. With cameras that tend to attract the enthusiastic amateur then F4 zooms (like the 16-45) etc. make a lot more sense.

I've no interest at all in consumer spec zooms or the current "limited" lenses and while I'd like some long F2.8 primes I can't justify the cost. The 16-45 F4 is a much better fit and I'll almost certainly buy one at some point, and if they add something like a 50-150 F4 that would also be of interest as while I love my 80-200 F2.8 it's not the most portable of lenses. In addition it would be nice to see some non-limited (and therefore much cheaper) primes being made with focal lengths like 16mm, 30mm, 50 and 85mm.

With the digital 645 looming it looks like Pentax are going to continue with targeting professionals with medium format style cameras and it'll be interesting to see how that goes. People tend to forget that while Pentax's 35mm offerings had little take up amongst professionals the same could be said to be true for their medium format kit - especially the 67.

That's a nicely composed scene that is just waiting for the right lighting and sky/cloud combination. With all that greenery it'd be a nice one to try IR on, especially with a blue sky.

Ammonyte - that's a lovely shot, very nice indeed.

As I was playing around in Elements anyway I applied the technique I've been reading about for using unsharp mask for contrast enhancement, so here's my digital interpretation of your shot:




Amount: 75%
Radius: 12.6
Threshold: 10

I took some shots with my shadow in it and some without (I was using the 2s mirror lockup to give me time to back away) however the one I preferred the exposure on was this one which just happened to have me in it.

Cheers - I do like the IR effect so I'm looking forward to getting a few more shots.