I do remember the Weston meter and invercone but have never owned one. If you don't have an incident lightmeter, the best way to meter that shot is probably to take a reading off the palm of your hand (in the same light as the swans) using your camera set to spot metering and manual exposure - and then open up one stop. Alternatively, you could spot meter off the brightest part of the swan and open up two stops.

I have just checked the EXIF data for the swan shot. It was taken at F/9.5 1/750 ISO100 - which suggests that the camera was on full auto. It is about 1 full stop down on the Sunny 16 rule. Ignoring the camera metering and shooting at f/16 1/100sec ISO100 (or equivalent) would probably have worked out fine too.

Andrew

Yes, that is pretty much what I do. I have a K30, several 16gb cards (Sandisk), with a couple of 8gb cards "just in case" and exclusively shoot RAW. This works fine for me.

Yes, I bought one for my K200D and it worked well - but all it really did was let me achieve focus confirmation a bit faster than I could without it.

Potential purchasers need to bear in mind that spot metering doesn't work if you install a split image focussing screen - very erratic and often two stops out Nowadays, I use spot metering all the time - so I would not consider buying a replacement screen for my K30.

Andrew

The microfocus adjustment should not make any difference at all if you shoot at f/16. If the shot is not sharp, it is probably down to camera shake.

Andrew

A quick fiddle in Lightroom .........




Andrew

I think you just might be spot on there. Is there really a significant hole between the K3 and 645Z that could profitably be filled by a Pentax FF - or would it just take sales from them?

Andrew

I love both photos - but especially the first one.

I like the way the zig zag waves lead your eye towards the horizon and the rising sun and the way the clouds on both sides of the photo draw lines in the sky that have a vanishing point near the sun.

The outfall pipes lead your eye into the picture and towards the wave that can take you back to the sun. If your eyes drift towards the windmill and dark land on the right of the photo, the clouds above it again take your eyes back towards the centre of the picture.

The composition works very well for me and I could spend hours looking at it. I wish I had the vision to put such lovely images together.

Congratulations.

Andrew

John, there are some light and dark patches on the top and middle rows; some diaphanous cutlery (?) on the bottom left and a curious looking bright area on the right hand quarter of the bottom right hand plate. Are these in the original images & due to lighting or shadows - or were they introduced by the Photomatix processing?

Hullman - I like the Birmingham Library image. Did you try correcting the mids and lifting the shadows in LR for just the shot with the lowest exposure? If you did, how does it compare with the image you posted here?

Andrew

I created the church window thread because I genuinely wanted to know whether HDR was the best approach to that subject. The HDR case was certainly not proven - although it was obviously able to produce a result that, when viewed in isolation, looked fine. For me to get hooked on HDR, I would have to see a better result when compared with processing the same image(s) without it. I have seen little or no evidence of that.

Can you please define what you mean by 'later', 'likely', 'better' and 'correctly'? If you are going to have a meaningful discussion in the thread about your original topic, your definitions need to be objective, not subjective. You have four undefined subjective terms in one sentence!!

Andrew

As obviously you will know, mono images whether prints or digital images do generally need to be dramatic and high contrast to do well in club comps. I haven't tried that - but maybe should.

Andrew