nelsonal

What's unacceptable about UFRaw? It's worked well for me.

I picked GIMP in expectation of just such a concern, so I'm just fine with this, might have to buy some Adobe stock.

135 f/5.6 is right in the sweet spot of headshots where the whole head is in focus.

I'm all for Hasselblad making money via luxury products for the high income and nouveau riche to signal (especially if the first product sells on only name and some exterior surface materials).

My choice would be a Jupiter-3.  It's soft to about f/2-2.8 though hits all your other requirements nicely.  I've found more of the very similar (but usually more expensive) Summar.  If you clean...

Aha, in that case: keep the final size of the image as small as possible (at the size you uploaded, it's very hard to see where the plane of focus is, at 1:1 on your home computer both your and...

The only impact the blades have on the aperture is the shape of highlights when stopped down.  Everything else depens on the lens design (primarily spherical aberration).

There are three factors you can change:  Subject magnification, aperture diameter, and to some extent background magnification.  With a 25ish mm aperture diameter you'll probably need to be pretty...

First thing I'd check is that the focus screen isn't upside down.  On every focus screen I've handled; there's a curved, smooth side that should face the mirror box and a flat, matte side that...

Yep, the expensive part of lenses is buying the optic glass, and getting 12-40 surfaces polished radiused to tolerances of the design, and polished to within a wavelength of light.  After that...

Added to Barrie's very good reasons, I suspect it would be should a firm make a lens that had good manual focus feel, a new production lens would likely be quite expensive relative to the large...

Thom's first line:  "I've added a moving average line to illustrate a point: note that the slope of the DSLR growth is higher than that of the mirrorless growth."  I read this as his belief that...

But if we're considering growth the base figure matters.  This is very true but is quite a different point than the one Thom is making.  Also it depends on how much one expects mirrorless to...

The glance conclusion is incorrect, here's the numbers on a log scale 2012-2013: Notice the slopes. The rate of growth of mirrorless remains above that of DSLRs.  There can be plenty of debate...

There's almost no savings between a used dealer lens and used private lens, while most dealers offer a much longer period for returns.  So I'd lean heavily toward dealers for any modern lens.  If...

The trend curve shows the same thing (faster growth for mirrorless).  Thom and others here, seem to be confused by the # of additional sales vs rate of growth.  If one sells 20m units one year and...

If you're only doing flowers, depending on the size of the flowers, you could probably get away with just about any speedlight, especially with the working distance 150mm provides.  A speedlight is...

My thinking is, you have an object that by its inclusion in the photo demands attention, but nothing else in the photo seems to be included to support the initial obvious subject.  I tend to think...

Ring flash is useful in part because when you get really close your camera can cast a shadow on your subject, so rings keep the lighting up at the front of the lens.  It makes cool catch lights in...

Less open/smaller aperture or f divided by a bigger number. Generally stopping down with potentially a little extra sharpening to help with the diffraction softness.  Good lighting never hurts...