Me, yeah, good ol' me during our stay at Stephen's house while waiting for the power to return to our house during the ice storm. What else is an ol' photographer to do besides play with his new camera -- Canon 5D MK II. I continue to be impressed with the new technology this camera offers. No, I have, at this point in time, little interest in its video capibilities, but rather I'm totally blown away with what it can do at extreme ISO ratings. Combined with ARC 5.xx I have been able to process its RAW files any which way I choose. The above image might have been taken by my wife who mere picked up the camera and fired a frame. She is not a photographer and if the camera had not been set for the lighting conditions (ISO, AV mode, aperture set, auto focus on, IS on, etc) she would not have know what to do. I had taken a couple of images of Stephen and of her and the camera was on the table. But more to the point, this image was shot at ISO 800, and essentially grainless (noiseless) as a color or monotone image. Why don't I call it a black and white image? Because it's not. It is an RGB image from beginning to end. I used a channel mixer layer to monotone it, and let it remain in RGB mode. I have added slight coloration in the shadows allowing the image to appear very slightly warm. I also added a curves layer in inverted screen mode to allow for "painting open" the shadows under the hat brim. The rest of the image is as it came from ACR. For a bit more tonal separation, I added an USM with settings of 10%, 60 radius, and then an additional USM with settings of 90% and .5 radius. I've been photographing for almost 50 years and I know of no film however developed that could produce this results. The camera just happen to be set to ISO 800, I'll put up another image in my next post that was shot at 3200 ISO which doesn't look a lot different in quality from this one. It also should be noted that the native size print from the converted file will print 12.5x18.75 inches at 300 ppi. That would be like printing a full frame 35mm negative on 16x20 paper. Now the question will be asked: Why not print this image in color since it was obviously shot in color? Matter of choice, and I didn't particularily care for mix of lighting on the image -- tungston, flouresent, and daylight. (Note: the bottom image represents viewing the image at 100% in CS4.)
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