Today I tried an experiment with my LX3 by shooting BW images straight out of the camera in BW Dynamic Mode. I found that while it does offer more contrast, some of the darker tones are turned to black. Here is an example. The color one was shot in Standard Color Mode, the other in Dynamic BW Mode. Both are straight out of the camera; no Photoshop other than resizing for the web.

Here are two more...

Looks almost like a "bw film" setting to me... Nice place btw. Your winter hide-away? Seems like a good place to bring lunch and practice some basic composition...

I prefer the color one over the B&W's. I wonder if you would get better B&W results by converting the color to B&W in CS3 or CS4.

theSuede wrote:
Looks almost like a "bw film" setting to me... Nice place btw. Your winter hide-away? Seems like a good place to bring lunch and practice some basic composition...


I wish it was my winter hide-away! It is a place in Miami, Florida called "Vizcaya Museum and Gardens". It was built by a millionaire back in the 1920's and decorated with high-end antiques to make it look like a European villa. The funny thing was that while I was there I think I counted 5 professional photographers getting shots of their clients in the garden area! Luckily this place was spacious enough to let all of us get shots without tripping over one another.

howardfuhrman wrote:
I prefer the color one over the B&W's. I wonder if you would get better B&W results by converting the color to B&W in CS3 or CS4.

This was actually the purpose of my experiment; to see if I could get equal results shooting B&W straight from the camera as I would if I had converted a color image to B&W in CS2. I still have more experimenting to do with the B&W film modes of the LX3. I plan on shooting in the other film modes sometime this weekend to see what is the closest I can get to a good CS2 conversion.