I tried PK tether and remote assistant today in anger with both bodies. Boy, am I disappointed.

Remote Assistant: 99 shot limitation. ARGH!


PK:
- crashed the K5 multiple times
- no limitations on the amount of shots but after a while, the buffer was "full" - autosave was set and there's space on the disk. Yes, it was RAW, but still...
- this then locked up the K5 three times while I was trying to work out what was going on.

- on the K10, it sometimes took two shots instead of one. It sort of worked for a while, there, too, and then decided to lock up on me on the laptop as well.

I'm very disappointed, I wanted to shoot a load of cloud movements for testing 1/30, 1/60, 1/125 and (whatever) in animation on both the K10 and K5 as I happened to have a storm coming in. No dice.

I'll see if I can get in touch with the PK Tether guy, it's got great potential and I'd love to be able to use it effectively.

Bret

Definitely
This sort-of surprised me, but I've found it's very much true.

Add to the list the ability and drive to get out there and take shots - and occasionally, this does mean getting out at 3:30 (or staying up...) to watch the sunrise, take a killer shot and realise in processing that the sun's burned out. ARGH!

Learn from your mistakes, remember, avoid them next time and get better as a result.

I set up a couple of flashes over a Jacuzzi in around 5 minutes Friday evening - something that would have taken me an hour or so last year. It worked very, very well. Learn. Take it with you. Test. Work out what's vital, important, not important and then improve your list as you go on. The more you understand the process and the limitations of the kit you have, the easier it is to do it right next time.

Bret

I'll agree with this. At the weekend we did all sorts of stuff and several things struck me:
- for group shots of more than 8 people or so, you really can't get away with something over 24mm
- for real, expansive landscapes, 18mm is enough, but if you select your shot, 24mm *might* be OK
- a 24-70 is more than enough if you're just doing ambient stuff and a 50-135 would be my weapon of choice as a pro, but then these and a 17-50 would be a killer combo for anything. The 135 M did some fantastic single portraits but 70 isn't really long enough for candid stuff (which is where the real emotions get shown).

Bret

I have a lot of ideas on that kind of thing; there's another problem, and that's heat. I figure 100mm dia should be fine - there's no problem with getting some aluminim cut for the baseplate and then the question is diffusion - which should be doable with some frosted Lexan.

Maybe even cheat and use some long M4 screws through from the lexan to the base plate - with threaded holes in the alu.

Bret

total input of 5W. Hmm.

Bret - who is about to order some serious HI-CRI cree XP-Gs from Oz at less than a fiver each

I really like those. Nice job.

Bret

... I just got a DiCaPac S10 and it's big enough for a K10+Grip+24-200, but not much more. It should be waterproof, too - I'll be testing it this weekend at a lakeside party

Bret

Why do you want one? the only thing it does is enable showing RAW files in explorer..... so I don't think there is one and I don't see the use case.

Bret

Definitely improved. I understand more what I want and how to get it, at least in photography terms

Bret

Absolutely. Transitions are fun Camtasia's Studio also works, but it's kind of crappy. Transitions are the problem.

If you have questions, ask.

Bret