Sorry for a very obvious question, but SRS seems to be down at the moment and wanted to see if they could beat Google shoppings best price of about £250.

Or if anyone has found anywhere cheaper still - pray tell

Was almost sold a Tamron 70-300 for £99 this morning, but thought I'd better check internet prices - then remembered there's this new Pentax 300mm lens that people have said good things about

K20D according to EXIF.

Those are some very rich colours, and I love the 2nd shot, reminds me of the characters in A Bugs Life!

I prefer the less distracting background on the first, but then I prefer the colours in the flower in the second

It's not the end of the world by any means, the sailing lake is a 5minute walk from where I live, and with the long summer evenings there are plenty of opportunities to improve my technique

I'd thought about this too - but would be way too fiddly! Easiest thing when I go there next time I think will be to have the lens slightly wider so that I can aim at the centre of the boat and get the shot without having to reframe. Then just crop the bit of extra sky or whatever out in LR.

Thanks for the insights and calculations everyone. When I posted the image I thought the camera had got confused by the relatively small thing I actually wanted to focus on and had aimed at the trees instead, but from what you're all saying (which I do agree with and makes sense) it's mainly due to me taking too long to compose the shot after locking the focus where the boats used to be.

Will try and be quicker next time! Thanks again.

Shutter speed was 1/500 i think, so should be fast enough to freeze the boats (they weren't going that fast). It was set on AF-S, and I was generally targetting the sail or the people and then recomposing slightly. The image I posted is a crop, probably just over a 1/3 of the orginal (shot landscape). It's just been a useful lesson to me that you can't always trust the auto focus options! The camera isn't set to max sharpness, it's +1 on the settings screen and I added a small amount in Lightroom afterwards. I realised that saying the focussing was 'way out' is a bit of an overstatement, but it's still a long way off the crisp image with a blurred background that I was after

Left the GX-10 on centre point focussing, then sat at the local sailing lake and took some snaps. Just got home and uploaded them, found that several are way out of focus (and sod's law it's the better photos it happened to!).

Is this just a case of the object I thought I had focussed on being too small in relation to the whole image? And any suggestions on how to improve my technique, I was trying to aim at the sail, but also did a few aiming at the people in the boats which is where it must struggle.




At least the trees look nice

Well done to the winner!

And I got some positive comments

Samsung GX-10
18mm, f9.5, 1/45, ISO200