It appears that the leaves are brown in the original and have color in the post processed clip. Also the grass under the falls is a little to hot. The only thing I have seen that bright is moss on the north side of a hillside in bright sunlight. The rock in the original picture appears to be limestone and in the other it is more like sandstone. Lots of red in the stone, but sandstone does have lots of reddish brown hues but limestone is almost always some shade of gray. Nice picture and the water is very attractive. Where was it taken?

I use something called an Expodisk that does a pretty decent job of setting white balance in good light, but leaves something to be desired in low light at sunsets. There I shoot several shots and adjust the Kelvin scale for the best white balance, usually around 4300 to 4800 Kelvins. I do try to get it right on the camera but "Lightroom" or "Aperture" are easy to set white balance with, as long as you can remember the colors in the scene if a white card is absent. Low light is where most setting methods leave something to be desired in my experience.

I have had pretty good luck with Tamron's new (as of last year) 70-300 with vibration control (image stabilization), but I wouldn't put it in the same class as the Canon L lenses of the same focal length. (It does well in the f8 to f16 range but I think it is a little soft outside the sweet spots.) If I were going to buy one of those I would get the 70-200 f2.8 with out the IS. Then get one of Canon's doublers. I've found that I rarely use the 70-300 and think that 70-200 is a better general purpose size especially in an L lens on a 1.6 crop camera.
I'm using a 40D right now and like you am awaiting a paradigm shift from Canon before I shell out another wad of cash

I think perfect is in the eye of the beholder, but I think getting an accurate white balance does move us closer to the bar of perfection. I use something called an ExpoDisc and that has helped me get what I think is a more accurate exposure and color than before when I used Daylight, Shadow, and the the other preset white balance settings. However, I now think the best way is to set the white balance manually in Kelvins, but it is time consuming and again is a judgement issue, since it takes me several shots to judge the accuracy. What I see on LiveView doesn't always translate into a picture I'm happy about adding to my library.

Great, I've used canon since the original Rebel 300 and now have a 40D and I always thought it was me on the focus. That tea shirt does speak volumes.

Funny how ugly can be beautiful! great shots. You must have had a fish on a pole to persuade it to sit still that close.

I bought one of the cheap adapters for an old canon 50mm lens and all I can say is that it works, but either the lens or the adapter makes the pictures somewhat soft. I shoot in manual from a tripod most of the time so that part of the deal didn't bother me , but I felt like the picture wasn't quite as sharp as I had hoped and I tried a lot of different things to ensure white balance and light were as accurate as possible and focused on 10X magnification with the Live View to fine focus and it still looked soft to me compared to my 28-135 canon kit lens. Maybe a better lens from my older canon would do the trick, but in this case it wasn't satisfactory.

Yes, I have. they are one of the few real camera stores with a full range of new and used gear in Indiana. Their prices are competitive with B&H and dealing with their staff is a rich, learning experience.

Cool idea. I'm going to try it.

I noticed that Aperture was available on the Apple App store for 80 bucks, which is a pretty reasonable price.

You might look at Apple's Aperture photo processing software. It works with Snow Leopard, (not cheap, but it won't put you in the poor house, and doesn't force you into monastic study habits,) which I use too, and you can transport files from iPhoto to Aperture seamlessly and also can mail and post pictures easily. I have Photoshop and Lightroom and find myself using them rarely now unless I want to do something really specialized, such as HDR.

It was the most striking sunset that I have seen from my backyard.

Early Promise.


Later on promise kept.

Thank you. The problem that we have around here is that we inly get these types of sunsets very rarely, and usually in the dead od winter. I got lucky that night.

We have had some nice sunsets and I wanted to share this particular evening.

Ten Minutes after Sunset

The reason I shoot in RAW is that I can manipulate a lot more of the image variables in the RAW format. You can change white balance as you mentioned. Also, exposure, color temperature, noise in the dark areas, black level which is better at setting contrast than the contrast controls, and sharpening, and on and on. Also, LightRoom allows for lens correction and camera correction into the shooting mode you used to capture the image, or into any of the other modes. However, it also almost requires taking a vow of almost monastic studying habits to find out how all of these goodies work and judicious use of your newfound power. You can end up with any kind of photo look you wish manipulating RAW and that is its benefits and perils.