Somehow I missed PentaxExpert back in the day. I followed your link and had more than a usual amount of amusement for a Thursday morning.

Who was he, did it come out at all? Genius, clearly.

Very interesting. Given that you can't exactly focus traditionally on the eyes, keeping nearly everything in focus as you have was probably quite a sensible option, since there's lots of line, colour and pattern to maintain the interest.

They clearly work best as a set, rather than individual images. So I'm wondering, once the novelty wears off, whether a collage of maybe the first six (since the last two seem to be different framings of the same models as the first two) of these might give you a single large image that will be a bit more durable in terms of impact and appeal. It would need to be printed, though - at web sizes the whole thing would be harder to get the full impact.

Not sure what a six-image triptych (sextych?) is called, but when I say collage, I don't necessarily mean overlapping. I'm not volunteering to arrange them!!

Yes, and they weren't OAPs doing waltz either. It was much younger, fitter, couples dancing Modern Jive and Latin American. In dodgy lighting.

Definitely not - I have a mate that used to be a pro tog with Canon gear (1D and 5D something or other), he photographed dance events for a living.

He was always moaning about, guess what...

... AF speed and accuracy

Thanks for putting my mind at rest

...back to packing up the bits for part-ex then

Digital is best. If I had to mess about with film, still, I probably wouldn't take pictures at all any more.

That said, apparently Polaroid cameras are all the rage again, amongst teenagers.

So clearly film is best, or at least coolest.

[sigh]

And there was me heading to SRS tomorrow to pick up a K-3.

I guess if I'm really disappointed, it's about a £300 gamble if I sell the K-3 within a few months.

Given the expense of changing systems completely (say, D7100, 50-500, UWA and short zoom, plus at least one powerful flash), it's probably a gamble worth taking.

Presumably, AG, it's the noise in the night skies and clouds that is unacceptable for you?

Edit - disregard the question, seen your swap request. From what you say, I'll stick with plan A, and get the K-3. I only have 1/4" of perspex to shoot through when I take pics from the air

I think the uncropped colour portrait is even nicer than the B&W. A softer look, somehow, without any loss of what appears to me as a really keen intelligence.

Not bothered about the background - it balances nicely with the also OOF green top, and the eyes are so compelling that the distraction is negligible. A very good use of depth of field, in fact.

I still think a bit of work on the exposure in the one of the three of them would make it even better. Getting expressions as good as that from three kids simultaneously is really hard, and you've done a marvellous job there.

... just as a postscript, macro doesn't always have to be 'central super-sharp subject, plain background'.

I had to chase this cricket around for quite a while, and actually he was quite hard to see.

So perhaps the surrounding distracting detail is part of the overall impression of camouflage, and hence valid.

Offered as no better than "quite nice" at best

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/IMGP5109-sm.jpg[/IMG]

It's an excellent question, thanks for teasing it out.

In general, I agree that excessive perfection can be unnatural, since nature often isn't that perfect.

But macro, I think, is something of a special case. It's where the subject is (to all intents and purposes) all, and almost anything else distracts.

So the slightest OOF-ness, or distracting background, distracts much more from a macro shot (especially when the main subject is really very good indeed, as Senn's were in the original thread).

Context is everything.

A few stray hairs in a natural portrait (such as in Epithet Man's #4 that I like so much) doesn't distract at all, whereas on the airbrushed, sanitised, slimmified cover of Vogue, they might.

But in point of fact, the stray hairs in that shot actually bound the main subject, rather than obscuring it as they easily could have, thus strengthening, rather than weakening, an already compelling composition and excellently captured, intelligent expression.

It's all about whether the imperfections distract. Often they don't but often they do. And macro shots, where lighting and detail is paramount, chances are that they will.

So images that would be wonderful otherwise, are just very good. Or even delightful - I'd allow that