I like #3 with the little white flowers, particularly the little purple details. Very nice.

Have you ever tried the Raynox? With their clever spring-loaded appliance, the glass can be used with most lenses. And it comes on and off in seconds. I use it with with my Pentax M 100mm f/4 macro and a close-focus manual 75-205mm f/3.5 zoom along with my Pentax 18-135 and 55-300 kit zooms.

This was one of the first posts I read and the first post I responded to after joining your forum.

My mind revisited the thread today as I was in the midst of post-processing a photo of an abandoned travel trailer (caravan?). To me, the image screamed to be in monochrome. So there I was, messing around in Lightroom, Tonality Pro, and Nik Silver Efex trying to find just the right mood for this picture. Doing all this stuff brought this discussion back to mind.

I have read everyone's thoughts, including my own previous post. It seems to me that the real answer is, "who cares?" You know what you want, and I know what I want. And both of us know what we regard as the legitimate way to achieve our goals.

Suppose you post a beautiful image of a hawk and it comes from a visit to the local raptor recovery center. That hawk is sitting on a perch and you probably took twenty frames from every angle. Your image may be right out of the camera, but it is, in effect, staged. Is that so different than me reworking an image which was captured at the local park, cloning out utility pole in the background and cropping tightly? Who cares? We both got what we wanted in a manner we were comfortable.

I love clouds in my shots, but I'll never merge clouds into a nice landscape to improve the image. They weren't there originally, so that's that. On the other hand, I will crop out a corner of a road or clone away some utility wires so it looks like I am far from civilization. Crazy ethic? Sure. But its my ethic for my images.

Today for me is all about creating a monochrome image to suit my subject. I didn't see it monochrome and it didn't come out of the camera in monochrome. No, but monochrome is what I want. I thought about it from the moment I took the shot.

In other words, its my own creation just as your image is your creation. How you get there is purely your choice. If your objective is to see how well you can shoot a photo without any post processing, go for it. If your objective, like mine, is to create the best possible image for display that you can, then that's great too.

Oh by the way, I actually did do those out-of-camera photos for years. The camera was a Polaroid. I don't want to do that any more.

Well, I know nothing about Chinon, but I do know some things about Kodak. The digital camera was actually invented at Kodak back in the 1970s by an engineer named Steve Sasson. It was cassette tape-based and produced an image on a TV set.

Kodak was a classic "razor and blades" business. Early on George Eastman realized that a camera sale was a one time deal, but film sales went on forever. Then as Kodak created automatic developing, they had the whole package. Camera, film, processing. You can imagine what they thought about the idea of digital photography.

They dragged their heels with digital and once it caught on, they could never catch up. The company eventually ended up in what the U.S. calls a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allowed them to reorganize. Today the company that made photography available to everyone has no consumer presence at all. It focuses on printing technology for corporate customers, touch-screen sensor components for smartphones and computer tablets, and film for the movie industry.

At any rate, maybe they got rid of Chinon at a time they were getting rid of a lot of stuff, scrambling to stay afloat.

Well, this is essentially my first post in the PentaxUser forum, so I might as well jump right into the fire.

Edgar Degas in his famous dancers at the barre reworked the painting numerous times before it was just what he wanted. X-rays also show that DaVinci's Mona Lisa went through multiple revisions. And, for some reason, I suspect that Shakespeare rewrote a line or two.

Having said all that, a recent photo exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showed a number of intermediate prints by some of the great photographers of the past. These prints had the photographers' notes and mark-ups for their final prints (burn this, dodge that, soften here, etc.). Multiple prints with adjustments. That is not exactly straight out of the camera, is it?

Given that the greats make revisions, why shouldn't we weekend warriors be given this same privilege? Just saying...

I have uploaded two photos to the gallery. I hope you enjoy them.

Heart Mountain

Two Spoonbils

Perhaps hotter, but surely not drier.

We are having very bad storms and lots of flooding. Our local river (the Brazos) is some 6-7 feet over flood stage. More storms are on their way. For many folks t's a good time to be somewhere else.

I thought I had posted this the other day, but now I can't find it. I hope I am not double-posting and already screwing up.

I am a retired math teacher from the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Although I have been taking pictures for about 10 years, I became serious about my photography about 3 years ago when I retired.

My focus is on wildlife (primarily shore and wading birds), flowers, and landscapes. I have recently been becoming more involved with macro which is really an outgrowth of the close-up work I do with flowers.

Along with photography, I enjoy boating, keeping a boat on a lake north of Houston. Also my wife and I travel a good bit in our motorhome which gives me plenty of opportunities for photographing interesting places.

I am a member of Pentax Forums and only recently discovered this forum.

My kit consists of a K5-IIs, 18-135mm, 55-300mm, 50mm (the plastic fantastic), M100/4.0 macro MF, Sigma 150-500mm, Vivitar 35-205mm close focus MF, and a Super Cosina 100-500mm close focus MF. Tripods include a Sirui travel tripod, Benro heavy-duty, Sirui K-40X ball head, and a LensMaster RH-2 Gimbal. Also there is a homemade ground in there someplace.