I've now received a few comments about these images; thanks!
I intentionally posted the images straight out of the camera,
with just about everything on the fully-automatic or default
settings.
I've also played around with the images (sometimes in Photo
Laboratory, but more often not: the extremely small window
in Photo Laboratory isn't condusive to much editing). There
is also a problem with Photo Browser; the way it creates it's
thumbnails appears to be format dependent for RAW, TIFF & JPEG
images, so preview colours and sharpness look very different.
A few common observations:
The foreground of the squirrel image is somewhat overexposed.
A little more detail can be rescued from the image by turning
the sensitivity down slightly. [This is the only correction
that *has* to be done from the RAW image before conversion]
The Lake View image looks a great deal better if you adjust
the levels (black point and white point). Playing around
with saturation and/or gamma produces an eye-popping scene.
In fact most of the shots are improved by level adjustment,
but this one shows it more than most; that's one reason why
I included it in the portfolio.
The shots using the AF1.7x are a little softer than the others
(all the images should be sharpened slightly before printing,
but I'm in the camp that prefers that sharpening be postponed
until the final stages of image post-processing).
Someone very kindly also sent me a version of a couple of the
images that had been run through focus fixer. I'll include
extracts from these, plus the best I've managed to do with
the other images, after I've given people a little more time
to offer comments and/or suggestions for improvement.
Bottom line, though (no surprises):
o Don't over-expose.
o Pay attention to the histogram, especially for JPEGs.
o Get image editing software that you are happy with -
you'll be using it a lot. The camera can produce a
great starting point, but it's rare to find an image
that can't be improved in the 'digital darkroom'.
> I've now put these up in a more user-friendly format.
>
> A gallery of thumbnails is at <http://jfwaf.com/InitialTest/>
>
> Clicking on the thumbnails takes you to a page for each image
> with a medium-resolution picture (720x481), the equipment and
> exposure details, and a link to the full-resolution image.
