At risk of repeating myself, I do think 4 and 10 are marvellous.

Perhaps 10 could be brightened a touch, and I'd be interested to see the colour versions of them.

Fair enough. I took your suggestion that I was being overly critical as implying I shouldn't have posted. If that's not what you meant, apols.

I guess I'm a bit sensitised...

But I was making a serious point. Suppose those distracting elements (which you surely don't deny?) were absent?

What words would you use then, if impeccable, excellent and superb were all taken?

Please not 'amazeballs'...

Here we go again. You think I'm being overly critical, I'm offering a genuine, honest point of view. No one is required to like it if they prefer the anodyne.

I didn't say they weren't good (or delightful). I said they weren't excellent, superb, or impeccable.

From dictionary.com: impeccable means 'faultless; flawless'

They simply aren't that. It's no wonder we get mostly "great shot" around here, when any contrary voice is simply stomped on. Don't worry, I'll probably crawl back into my box again soon, and you can turn your dissent-detector back down again.

Normally I cringe when people post pictures of their kids, since it's impossible to tell them the truth, so I normally don't bother.

However, to my relief, these are exceptions.

5 - 8 are nice, but as you've hinted, the expressions are fairly blank, so it's difficult to engage without the context you have, knowing them already. I like 9 very much, the eyes are really compelling.

I'd pick out 4 and 10 as particularly excellent, since they have an intensity of expression that's absent in the others.

I'd lose the cheesy captions though. The pictures stand on their own merit IMO.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but this thread is an example of the sort of unalloyed praise that has been commented on extensively recently.

Certainly the pictures are sharp and well-lit. Certainly they demonstrate that a long lens can be used unusually close and give good results. Respect to the OP for demonstrating this - the DA* 300 isn't usually thought of as a macro lens, and giving some examples of how it can be used in that capacity is a very helpful addition to the Pentax canon.

It's the gushing responses I take issue with. The fact that a particular lens was used doesn't make any difference to the fact that (as one brave commenter has noted) there's a distracting purple splodge in the first, OOF green background (leaf?) above the wing in the second, white OOF stripe through the main subject in the third, and a distracting red splodge in the fourth. For macro shots to be really excellent, there really needs to be no distractions, so these detract.

Now, I'm not for a moment to be claiming to be able to do any better. Very nice, and a good insight into what you can do with the DA* 300, certainly. No criticism of the OP at all.

But superb, excellent, impeccable, no.

Of course not And I'm very aware that once someone switches, there'll often be an element of confirmation bias in anything they give an opinion on.

But overall there would be more balance. And I'm perfectly capable of teasing out the helpful from the unhelpful.

In general, I prefer a 'warts and all' approach to anything, rather than a Pollyanna-esque 'everything is lovely'. On balance, I think it would be helpful to have somewhere where other brands could be usefully compared and contrasted. I'm not asking for a Nikon gallery, of course there'd be no point in that.

Phew... I'm relying on it to turn me into a better photographer...

(yes, I know... ... like the golfer that hadn't played for ten years, and said, "I know what will improve my game - some shiny new clubs...")

Well possibly.

However, I know for a fact that some people do have other brands as well as Pentax, and would be able to discuss their relative merits and demerits here if the moderation policy was different. Some of that might have been helpful.

And I also know for a fact that quite a lot of people have gone to other brands, and would also have been able to offer opinions had they been permitted to.

And they might not all have left, either.

Yes I'm not disagreeing with this at all, or saying that I don't like to look at the images posted.

On the rare occasions I see a really marvellous shot, though, there's not much I can do other than applaud (which I'm very happy to do - credit where it's due and all that).

It's the shots that aren't good that I tend to learn the most from, but when the mediocre gets lauded as great, I just lose interest.

I think that if someone wants critique, they should post the image with accompanying critique of their own picture. ("I was trying to achieve X, however I'm not sure it worked because of Y and Z... what do you guys think?").

That way at least, you could be sure that they actually wanted intelligent critique, were prepared to engage in thoughtful debate about it, and weren't secretly just hoping for praise (which I often suspect is the case, even with mediocre images).

And before anyone looks at my gallery, you won't find much. You don't have to be a chicken to know that an egg's bad, and I already know that most of my pictures aren't worth posting

I'm not at all sure that improving the quality of the images posted here should be a particular objective. Certainly if people are being helped by the critique they receive, their images will improve, but of course if others, especially beginners, start posting, the average quality won't necessarily change at all.

If I want to see marvellous images, there are any number of places I can go to see them - there's no special advantage of them being here, and I don't care what camera they were taken with unless it informs my own photography.

What I want from a forum is interesting discussion from members of an online community, and the opportunity to give and receive help where possible.

On which note, I've come to the decision to get a K-3. It hasn't been an easy process, since I've been considering switching brands. In the end I decided that it would be too expensive, and too much of a jump to the unknown to justify starting from scratch, and I can't afford two systems.

However, the sad fact is that the prohibition on discussions of the pros and cons of other brands meant that this forum was no help to me at all in coming to the decision.