mattsteg wrote:Guys, enough with the RAW holy war. There are plenty of good reasons to choose to shoot RAW (either routinely or for a specific shoot) and plenty of good reasons to shoot straight to jpeg (either routinely or for a specific shoot).
Lex: what looks "funny" about your Raptors photos? They don't strike me as particularly strange.
Magnification is the size (in specifications at closest focus) of the image on your camera's sensor relative to the size of the object in real life. With 1:1 or 1x magnification you can fill the entire image with something the size of the image sensor - a little less than an inch wide for "crop" cameras. With 1:2 magnification you are at half size, so you can only focus close enough to fill the image with something a couple of inches wide. 1:3.5 would be less capable still (in terms of magnification). More than 1x magnification in a lens (without added accessories) is pretty rare. I can think of a Canon lens that does it, but that's it for SLR lenses i know of (and that lens is very specialized).
That's because I only uploaded the good ones.
Here are some that will show what I'm talking about:
http://s978.photobucket.com/albums/ae26 ... g&newest=1
http://s978.photobucket.com/albums/ae26 ... g&newest=1
http://s978.photobucket.com/albums/ae26 ... g&newest=1
http://s978.photobucket.com/albums/ae26 ... g&newest=1
. It cannot focus on anything more than a foot away from the camera.
) about "intelligent" AF and exposure systems, cameras can only use what algorithms they are programmed with, so can never be as smart as the human behind the viewfinder. This is probably exacerbated by the wide (for a tele) aperture and the shallower depth of field in front of the focal plane. 
