Actually, her eyes are pretty fantastic in your colour one. I need to steal those eyes.Yeah I burned off the top and the bottom to bring the eye into the face more; there's a bit too much going on in the frame but cropping it doesn't work for me.
Yep, every camera manufacturer (the vast majority of them, anyway) has it's own proprietary RAW format. DNG is Adobe's open-source format, you can convert any RAW file to a DNG. You can even keep a backup of the original CR2 (in your case from your Canon) inside the DNG file if you are really worried about it. But I would suggest that that is a pointless waste of space. There's nothing wrong with DNG but I just stick to the CR2's that my camera produces. Some people advocate converting everything to DNG for archival reasons (they think because it's open-source it will be around forever but the proprietary formats may not) among others, but I don't see the point personally.http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2041925/avf-raw.dng
See if this .dng is any better. It's a smaller file. Is it just as flexible as the RAW then?
I really like that second edit Jimmy. I would ask that you mark mine as private on your Flickr, please, so that they don't show up on your photostream.