…or back to the Dimage A2?

This is a picture from my 2006 Brittany series. The boats where lying beautifull in the evening sun at low tide, right behind our appartment.

Ever since I was using the Nikon D80, I started using the RAW format. Finally with the appearance of Lightroom, I’m shooting RAW exclusively. Today I found some of these MRW files that I took with the Minolta Dimage A2. I wasn’t quite able to do something with them by that time. But now I was interested in the potential that’s in there. I’m quite impressed about the color correction of the APO lens. Also the 12bit color depth contains a lot of reserve for highlights and shades. Even noise is well controllable, at least with ISO 100. A different thing is resolution. I never really understood the discussions about the lens beeing not able to serve the new 8 MPixel chip; now I can see it.

After all, I do not regret to have switched to the D80. But it’s good to know that there would have been some potential with the Dimage A2 too.

For a better photo browsing experience, I recomend everybody using the new Firefox 3 to enable color management. And here’s how to do it:

- type ‘about:config’ into the adress bar
- filter for gfx.color
- change ‘gfx.color_management.enabled’ to true (just double click on the entry)
- restart Firefox

Enjoy viewing pictures now with there real colors. Don’t forget to calibrate your monitor!

Yes, I’ve broken my beloved 1000x neutral filter for ultra long time exposures. Right in the middle of the Markus square in Venice I dropped it down to the 1000 years old marble ground.

All hints to a dealer of theses ND3 filters with 72mm diameter and slim shape are welcome.

Edit: got a new one, B+W this time. Maybe soon there will be a “Welcome ND3.0″.

Yeah, I did the step up to WordPress 2.5. So far everything seems to be working quiet well. If somebody encounters any issue, please let me know.

As a trade-off I give you a hint to the new photos just added from Venice. Texts will follow.

Venezia 2008