It's been Golden Week in Japan. Three consecutive days of holiday. On Wednesday, a group of foreign photographers got together for a walk through downtown Tokyo - photographing as we made our slow journey from Kita Senju to Nippori. It was an interesting experience taking photographs in such large company! Also looking forward to seeing other members of the group's results and how we each interpreted the scenes presented to us.

You can find my initial results at:

http://akikana.com/gallerytwo/shitamachi_one/shitamachi_one.html
http://akikana.com/gallerytwo/shitamachi_two/shitamachi_two.html

The photograph of the dog on the index page of my site was also taken en route.

Please enjoy and as usual, any comments appreciated.

Two asides:

The stone statues are in a graveyard that was on the site of an Edo period execution and burial ground. Some 20,000 people met their death over a 300 year period there.

The park where the two baseball related photographs were taken is next door to the elementary school that Nobuyoshi Araki attended.

Take care
Guy

Andy,

Thanks for taking the time to look through my site and most of all taking the time to write back with a comment. Appreciate the feedback regarding the layout of the galleries.

Take care
Guy

Here's some gelleries of recent work using the *ist D. Hope you enjoy them and any comments (good, bad or ugly) happily received.

Guy

http://www.akikana.com/sakura2005/sakura.html
http://www.akikana.com/gallerythree/flowers/flowers.html
http://www.akikana.com/gallerytwo/fish_market/fish_market.html

Let gravity be your aid...

For foggy looking water you need to open the shutter for longer - between 1/8 and 1 second (depending on flow rate of river) but this is not a hard rule so experiment accordingly. Because of long shutter speeds a tripod is a must.

I was wondering if any members had any direct experiences/results using this lens (preferably with an *ist D attached to one end) they could share with me.

Thanks in advance
Guy

Make sure you are using a circular polarizing filter with autofocus lenses. As you've used these filters before I shouldn't have to mention the camera being 90 degrees to the sun's axis for best results.

Pentax's raw files are not compressed whereas Canon and Nikon compress theirs.

As I am a Paint Shop Pro user I bought their Paint Shop Photo Album. I have no experience of other similar software but PSPA4 works for me.

Version 5 is currently in beta testing and you can download copy (as well as trial version of 4.0) at www.jasc.com. I have tested it briefly and the user interface seems cleaner. Functionality is enough for me too. I think most of the additions to these programmes are processing tools which you would use PSP or Photoshop to do.

My advice would be to buy whatever fits your cataloguing needs and don't pay too much attention to creation of pictureshows, websites, processing funtionalities.

Hope this helps