I critiqued Sony and now I have to praise them. It's all black and white...

I stand corrected. The engineers at Sony have given me exactly what I want in order to make perfect out-of-camera, black and white jpegs. I can control the tone curves in the highlights and shadows, as well as controlling the panchromatic color response of the system. Just like using the filter presets in other brands of cameras but with a much more profound level of control and customization. Too bad their marketing people seem hellbent on keeping this advanced level of performance a closely guarded secret....

Backing up for a moment. I had recently written bemoaning the idea that Sony lagged behind other brands (and especially Fuji and Olympus) when it comes to providing a great experience when shooting black and white in camera. Almost all cameras now have a monochrome or black and white setting among their creative settings. Fuji seems to lead in this feature set by having not only color filter emulations but also presets for some of their most popular black and white films. When I dive into the Creative Style menu of the Sony cameras I find only the basic setting and controls for only sharpening and contrast. It's a very limiting feature set and the results are

A blog note and a warning. Please read.

I looked at the site stats yesterday and am a bit alarmed. I've sent some notification to Blogger (Google) but pretty much all of a sudden I'm seeing traffic numbers that are a bit crazy. We went from 5,000 to 7,000 page views per day to10,000+ yesterday and already 18,000+ today. They are all originating from a site listed as http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1

I have tried following the link only to get a redirect warning notice from Google. Note that the address uses "google.co" instead of "google.com".

I don't understand it but I am always wary of web anomalies. As I wrote above, I have sent screen shots and samples to Google/Blogger and am waiting to hear back.

While I like the idea  of having a legion of followers I really only want to write stuff for legitimate human beings. If you are an internet genius and you have some ideas about this please toss me an e-mail or leave your pearls of wisdom in the comments.

If this persists I may shut down the blog for a few days while brighter minds get to the bottom of all this.

Help?  Kirk

Someone mentioned a "redirect virus" although Blogger is not hosted on my computer. Just something to be aware of and cautious about.


Added note: Smarter minds (thanks Chuq) have pointed me to some FAQs about this issue. It seems to affect only the internal stats, conveys no viruses to readers and is a known issue at Google. I will leave this up for a few days just to let everyone know. Thanks for the quick responses from my professional audience!