ND Filter Help

I had the sensor in my istDS cleaned at Calumet in Birmingham last year - free service offered at an Open Day I attended.

There was no problem. It's just that they normally only deal woth Canon or Nikon and so have no specific knowledge of Pentax (you only have to look at their website to realise that). Just make sure your battery is fully charged.

Great michael

Can you tell me what products you used?

in fact can anyone tell me how to do a sensor clean without F*king the thing up?

Everytime I mention sensors to people I get pursed lips and head shaking. Do you need some sort of arcane knowledge to do it or what?!?

Mirror up
Lift it upside down
Blow up into the sensor with a posh blower check and repeat until clean.

"A posh blower"

can someone direct me to a good blower?

I cleaned a few specs off the K-5 sensor using a Rocket blower. It worked but I now have a very dirty viewfinder! Unless your posh blower has a decent air filter (the Rocket doesn't) you may end up blowing in new dust. This one has a filter:

Koh HEPA Jet Air Blower

The Arctic Butterfly might be a better way of ensuring you remove the dust from within the body, rather than just swirl it around, but it doesn't come cheap.

Back to the subject of 10 stop filters, I have the Hitech 10 stopper that costs around £60. It does produce a blue cast, but as mentioned in this thread I can confirm this is easy to remove, either in post processing or by setting a custom white balance in camera (I tend to go down the post processing route).

I've also tried welding glass - quite striking results with this but it's only good for black and white images.

As regards sensor cleaning, it is very easy to do with a spatula that has a flat end, an appropriate cleaning swab and some cleaning fluid. I've cleaned my K-x several times this way with no ill effects.

Regards
David

Interested in an ND filter, i have a destination wedding in Zante in June, inant to use my primes for shallow depth of field, the wedding is at three so the light will still be bright, what ND filter would people suggest to shoot at f/1.4 ISO 100?

Dont know mate..

What about this welding glass then>

How do you get it onto the lens? Would it be a good idea to stick it onto a filter????

Confused.

Stick a welding glass to a filter is an option, better if you can somehow make it a sliding fit into some sort of carrier.

With the welding glass/10 stopper in place in front of the lens you'll see nothing through and will therefore need to focus your scene before fitting it.

Hi Alistair. There's a thread here on welding glass. Unfortunately my photos no longer show, although if you click on the flickr title they will open in flickr

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/welding-mask-glass-29184/p-0