[quote=Rongnongno]

When will we finally admit that a good photographer will produce better work using the proper tools as with every other professionals?

Thank you. I get tired of "It's not the camera."

My Canon Xti was a great camera in broad daylight, but it really fell down on low light captures. There was a lot of noise, and my beloved little camera couldn't record anything like realistic color in low light. So, what, I must be a lousy photographer? I can expose properly all I want, but I can't put extra color on the sensor. (Then there are people who believe one shouldn't use postprocessing.)

Recently I looked at photos from a trip to the Canadian Rockies from 2005. On that trip, I'd finally given in to digital and used my husband's old Canon 10D. I was sorely disappointed when none of the glowing colors or striking contrasts showed up in my photos, and basically never looked at them again. Now, after years of experience with PS and Nik filters, I fixed them to adequately express the beauty I saw.

I can't wait for cameras to be equal to the human eye. I wouldn't be able to afford one, but maybe I can rent one. :)

Two challenges with the 50mm in Hawaii:

"Feet zoom" doesn't work when the most interesting wildlife need 300mm. Monk seals are an endangered species; they require breathing space of 50 yards by law. You're obligated to view sea turtles "from a distance." Sometimes there are folks enforcing these edicts. A photographer may even spot a rare bird, equally "from a distance."

The 50 isn't wide enough for the most beautiful landscapes.

Having been to Hawaii several times, I wouldn't go without my 28-300mm.

Getting it right in camera as a timesaving feature that solves the problem of post processing was probably more true in the days of film.

Given the same time, place, angle, distance, camera settings, lens, and film, one commonly available SLR camera was likely to take the same picture as another.

Nowadays, the camera itself matters more than it used to. My bygone Canon 10D will not provide me with the same quality RAW file that my five year old Canon 5D2 will, or my old Rebel xti, and the 5D has undoubtedly been superseded by others of its class. It may also have been superseded by some P&S cameras by now. And of course all other brands/models will have differences in the quality/qualities of the RAW files they produce.

"Getting it right in camera" no longer happens on any kind of level playing field.

Sorry, my embed didn't work. Here's a link to the photo.

http://kalena.smugmug.com/Flowers/Summer-Garden-2010/13394719_3CqzhF#!i=945313875&k=EPWZy

So the embed didn't work, and afaict there's no way to delete a post from edit? And apparently no way to add a photo in the standard way if you're editing.

Anyway, I'll try again.

I absolutely adore my 90mm Tamron 2.8. They may be cheaper used, if you can find one.

Oh, bless you! This article solved a problem I have been gnawing at for AGES.

Buying your wife a nice camera is probably the *best* way to ensure she never questions your hobby time or money. Of course, she'll be spending her own hobby time and money, but it works pretty good at my house. Says the wife. :)

Therein lies the problem with taking a portrait with a 50 mm lens, to start. You have to "get up on" people. And then they look at you funny. :)

With a longer lens, you get to stand farther away.

To me, with the incredibly low resolution available on the internets, it looks like a pretty nice picture. The auto white balance is performing quite well; I assume incandescent lighting? I can't exactly tell if there are parts where it's out of focus, but like the previous poster said, that depends on your depth of field as created by your f-stop. The auto exposure looks good.

She doesn't look as lovely to the camera as she does to your eye because the eye adjusts itself to lessen shadows, downplay highlights, and correct color. Your camera is recording things your brain doesn't even register. You know how they used to make movie monsters in the olden days, right? By lighting them from below. That's how important the color/direction/amount of lighting is.

I really, really love the flower shot, although I believe its beauty has nothing to do with your brand of camera, and even if it did, we couldn't tell at the low resolution of the internets. :)

Every member of the family with a P&S has pictures of that newborn with grim hospital fluorescents fighting the on-camera flash to highlight every blotch. In the same way that we may forget that black and white photography <I>never</i> showed the "real thing" -- no red blotches! -- even though it was the photographic record, we sometimes forget that photographers are artists, not forensic scientists.

A great thing to learn with this picture would be selection and cloning! Use the magic wand tool to select their faces, then choose Select Inverse. Use the bushes or the trees as clone starters for the area between their faces. The change in how the photo looks will be amazing once the car is gone.

You've got an Elements manual, right? If not, check one out of the library. I doubt if the magic wand tool has changed much over the last few incarnations, so you won't need a brand new one. Or, Youtube probably has some videos.

I'm not sure science has built a camera sensor that is equivalent to the entire range seen by the human eye. If they have, I know can't afford it. Editing of every kind has always been a way to compensate for that.

<I>Unless you want to do a lot of graphic design, Elements can do a lot of what you will probably want to do. </i>

Most heartily agreed. I used Elements in its various incarnations for about a decade, and I have PSE9 right now. I bought it despite having purchased CS4 two years ago and taken classes to learn how to use it. There are some things in Elements that are simply much easier to use that the same function in Photoshop. Elements now also has the same type of masking capability that Big Brother Photoshop has, although Nik's Viveza works very well indeed for most things I would've used a mask for.

I only bought CS4 to be able to run the Nik Dfine noise reduction filter as an action, and then I never felt I really needed it. Now I use CS4 most of the time, since I bought it, learned it, and bought a new $2,000 desktop computer so that it would freaking run properly.

Photoshop has its drawbacks. One of them is that it sucks so much memory that neither my old computer with 3Gs of RAM, my husband's computer with the same, or his work computer (dunno how much RAM) would open more than four RAW files without crashing the computer. This is despite what Adobe would have you believe.

The other drawback is that everything imaginable seems to mess with it. I lost several functions when I installed the Nik filters. I have been reluctant to add other brands of filters, obviously . . . although I suspect I could use them just fine in Elements!

Elements is as stable as the day is long.

There is an actual time and place that makes B&W more . . . palatable, appealing, prettier than color, and I say that as a person who has no artistic interest in B&W. If you look at well-known wedding photographers' shots, which I spend a lot of time doing, you may notice that there are not a lot of wedding photos that are shot in b&w unless they are free of cluttered background (not common in a random wedding photo except for bride&groom portraits) and have unusual lighting. When you do see them, they're taken at the reception.

This puzzled me until I did several wedding receptions.

There's nothing that will solve the "several drinks, a big meal, and some dancing" problem of red-faced and sweaty like black and white. I know this will offend every b&w enthusiast ever, but I don't even care to watch b&w movies. :)

Nik Silver Efex Pro is an outstanding b&w converter. Even my husband, who actually does like b&w photography, is amazed by what it can do.