Or that washing it in the shower is a good idea......

David, these are all taken from the flight-deck of an aircraft, so a longer shutter speed is not an option, though on dark nights I've had a few shots with 2-3 sec exposures (one of these hot a Highly Commended in the Sony WPO Awards), but if it's a very active storm and I get more than one lightning strike I get motion blur. Highly active monsoon storms allow me to shoot bursts, but I have to use a reasonably fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur.

The high ISO is due to the distance from the storm, I can get down to 400 or even 200 ISO when nearer the storm. Withba moon I can drop the ISO a stop or two. These shots are all crops, about 25% of the image. I'm looking for a Samyang 85mm f1.4 at the moment specifically for shooting storms.

I've been experimenting photographing thunderstorms at night for a while now, and with the monsoon season starting have had a few opportunities recently to get some shots. The main issue I have is that I have to under-expose the shots by a couple of stops to avoid blown highlights from the lightning, which tends to translate into more noise than I'd like in PP. All these shots are taken with the K5 and smc Pentax-A 50mm f1.4, wide open or f2, at 1/30th sec, ISO 1600 or 3200.

A nice set, the third one is excellent.

The more I see of what people are doing with the Q, the more I'm tempted to get one...nice looking set up, and nice pics.

Drop me line when you decide to sell the FA20mm.... I nearly bought a 77mm Ltd yesterday in Hong Kong, £539 new, I'm already wishing I had bought it...Still, I'm coming back here in 10 days so if the other half can be talked round I'll get it then.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the lighting on these, though I am not a macro expert; in fact I hardly ever do any. I think the processing could be tweaked, and mainly by using levels. I think a lot of people get too hung up on only pulling the histogram in on levels adjustments to where it starts curving upwards.

I hope you don't mind, but I have taken three of your shots and done levels adjustments on them, all by just pulling the right hand side of the histogram a bit to the left. In the first two I also erased the levels adjustment about 90% on the brighter highlights using a soft brush.

With Flickr you can upload full size Jpegs, but when you link to a smaller size of the image you don't get the dreadful loss of resolution due to compression that Photobucket seems to produce. In fact linking to a smaller size of the image on Flickr gives you a better image than one from Photobucket uploaded at the same size you want to link to. I gave up on Photobucket a while ago. You can also disable downloading of your images on Flickr, or make them only available to family or friends. I'm not sure if Photobucket has that facility.

The thing I don't get out of all of this, is why the legislation was passed in the first place? Who brought the legislation into play, and why? It has to make you wonder about corporate influence in government.

Yes it does. But you are going to have to employ a lawyer and take it to court to prove it. Previously you could have just used a cease and desist letter.