The torture you put your poor model through! She is very attractive though, so I can easily forget the photographer as you mentioned!
Question: Since this pic is very small the way it is posted, it is hard to tell how the quality of the shot came out. And also it is hard to tell how the shot looks in focus, pixellation, and noise, as well as softness.
I have found the L1 to be surprisingly good for an ultra-compact, as you know...pleasantly surprised. My U20 actually took respectable photos, but they did not lend themselves to much editing or cleaning ability. The obvious flaws in such a tiny lens and low resolution meant decent prints and decent computer displays, but cropping or enlarging were not really possible with the U20.
The L1 on the other hand seems quite capable at not only capturing the shot with decent color and detail...but the tiny lens' softness can be pretty cleanly touched up with Unsharp Mask in PSP or Photoshop, and the minor shadow noise inherent in such a tiny sensor cleans up pretty nicely in most noise reduction programs.
The result seems to be a camera that takes great snapshots out of the box, allows respectable enlargements or crops; plus has the added ability with a little post-processing to produce pretty good shots for presentation or artistic pursuit. You could certainly get by with the L1 without ever post-processing a shot, just using it for vacations, snapshots, funtime, and as a go-anywhere camera for all purposes. But if you wanted to take your shots a step further, the shots definately allow for some editing, cleaning, and touching up which my last ultra-compact really didn't.
As for your posts...if you could post 800x600 or so, it would help show some details of your shots. Also, do you post-process at all? And when you downsize shots, are you running high compression in JPEG? I have taken to post processing my L1 shots for some light USM and occasional noise reduction if shadowy, and when I downsize, I save at JPEG compression 1 or 2, which is very low compression...to avoid pixellation of the shot. I used to take pics in jpeg fine, then downsize and save with jpeg 10 (fairly high compression), so by the time I uploaded it and lost a little more quality to the upload, my posts loooked very pixellated and noone could really tell if I or the camera performed well because the resulting shot was unimpressive due to all the compression!
I took this at 3 in the afternoon, in bright sunshine with no fill
flash so that the shadows are harsh, and with my model looking into
the sun so her eyes are slits. In short the photographer wasn't
very good on this shot.
But I think Ann's a pretty girl and I think the L1 is a good little
camera so forget the photographer and enjoy the good things.
John
--
Justin
They are a good combo to use.