not as sharp as i would have hoped. Canon 50 F1.4

Dan (gdanmitchell) is a frequent poster on this site, and I find his advice is generally spot-on and well reasoned. The response above is a typical well thought-out example. I always look for his response on threads like this

I also like to use the 50 1.4 for indoor shots of the kids... I used to be an "available light" only shooter, but discovered that external flash (bounced) gets consistently better results. This shot of my daughter at 18mo being silly, 50 1/4 @ f 2.2 1/200s

I tend to set the camera in M mode at 1/200 ISO 400 and dial-in an aperture somewhere between 1.8 - 2.8 for shots like this. The light meter will tell me how "much" fill will come from the flash. With those settings its only a small amount of fill-flash and my 580EX recycles really quickly... can shoot 5-10 images with the flash firing correctly each time. I do need add between 1/3 and 1.5 stops FEC when shooting this way because my technique (or the 5D2 flash metering) is a bit off.

Now I look at this image again (a year ago now) it looks like I screwed up the B&W conversion in Lightroom because I've lost detail in the skin tones. The original image as shot is here, perhaps someone can tell me what I did wrong in conversion. (I didn't bother correcting the color cast here, since I was converting to B&W anyway).

Love my 50 1.4... even though it's soft at 1.4

-v