Well I prefer yours, to be honest

Gursky's one is interesting, in a geometrical sense, I suppose, but it doesn't do much for me.

It would have been clever if it had been a real view, without needing the cloning, but for it to be worth nearly three million quid is madness.

It smacks of a pretentiousness, even an 'emperor's new clothes' thing, to me, but I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to art.

In that article, it says

[quote="BBC"]"In the end I decided to digitalise the pictures and leave out the elements that bothered me," he added.[/quote]I interpreted that to mean he'd been cloning.

Edit: Tate article...

[quote="link above"]Gursky digitally erased buildings on the far side of the river from his picture. This manipulation enhances the image visually, giving it more formal coherence. Rather than the sense of a specific place, the picture conveys an almost Platonic ideal of a body of water traversing as landscape. Gursky talks about this image in terms of its contemporaneity, saying, ‘I wasn’t interested in an unusual, possibly picturesque view of the Rhine, but in the most contemporary possible view of it. Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river’ (quoted in ‘... I generally let things develop slowly’, Andreas Gursky: Fotografien 1994-1998, p.ix).
[/quote]The case for the defence rests, m'lud

The problem with that first picture is that there's just way too much interesting detail.

Clone it out like in this one, and it could be worth millions...

I just let the AF handle it for my one, I thought it did quite well.
Eh? I'm not falling out We can have friendly discussions can't we?

I don't know much about this sort of thing, but the sunlight on the moon must be many times brighter than any earthshine. I don't see how you could possibly see earthshine on the bright side.

Anyway, doubtless someone that knows about these things can shed some light ( pun intended).

I really hate the way the forum software seems to mess with image sizes. Yours looks a lot better if you click the link and let it display in a separate tab on its own.

You should have another go, I think - if the 150-500 is as good optically as the 50-500, you could expect better than this, I think.

By the way, if you're referring to the bright rim on the right, I don't think that's earthshine.

Earthshine is seen on the dark side of the moon, not the sunlit side.

I notice you've got some of the colour though. I haven't managed that yet in any of my pictures.

I gave up taking pictures of the full moon some time ago, since with the sun shining straight at it, the visible detail is inevitably less.

I thought it might be a decent test for the new Bigma, though, so I had a go last night.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Moons/IMGP0159-3.jpg[/IMG]

For comparison, this was probably my previous best full moon:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Moons/IMGP2385-1b-smsh.jpg[/IMG]

I should probably re-edit it to pull the brightness back so that it's a better comparison, but even so, it's nowhere near as detailed.

Can't you pull up the shadows a bit? Then it would be just the framing that was a bit wrong.

Funny, though, how your perspective changes, doesn't it? Somehow the fact that someone has chosen it for publication outweighs all the C&C in the world.

I take it there is no more of the frame available at the left?

Well done, though. It's a good feeling... (I've had it just the once, many years ago!)

Well it very probably isn't.

It really beggars belief that they can create something like this that is either fine consistently, or wrong consistently, or wrong by an amount that varies over time.

I'm lucky enough to be able to point the camera and 'just know' whether the thing is horizontal. I'm weird like that - I can count seconds in my head to a precision of better than 2%, and I can sense 'horizontal' to better than 1 degree.

Why the **** can't Pentax implement something at least as good. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get.

BTW, I so don't want to hear that both JR's K-5s are perfect, and always have been.

Yes, I'm sure it does. It must rotate the sensor by the amount the level detection thinks it's leaning.

[sigh]

This is a classic example of the way Pentax shoots itself in the foot. They have a nice idea, and then screw up the implementation, or the QC, or both.

Not only can they not get the level right, they also fail to provide a simple zeroing function. For heavens sake, even my 20 year old bathroom scales have that!

When I took the first K-5 back, I checked the first new one out of the box. It was miles worse than the one I was returning.

I have no confidence in Pentax at the moment. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of the people raving about how wonderful the K-5 is haven't even looked closely at half the features.

When I use my camera, I want to be completely certain that if the picture is crap, it's my fault. I do not want to constantly have that niggling worry that maybe there's some little thing wrong with the gear that's going to turn round and bite me at some inconvenient moment.

Grrrrr.

One of the reasons my first K-5 went back was the electronic level indicating a lean when it wasn't. Not that I use it much, but it annoys me when something doesn't work. It also seemed to be getting worse with time - though at the time I put that down to my imagination.

However, I checked the level on the second one very carefully in the shop, and again when I got it home, and it was fine. One of the SRS guys also had a careful look, and agreed with me that it was level.

Obviously, you can compensate for a platform that might itself not be level, by noting a lean in the opposite direction if you turn the camera round. I did this carefully, on several different platforms, and it was bang on.

Now it's not fine. Not by much (just one bar off on the display), but it seems to not be perfect any more.

Could it be something that changes over time????

Someone suggested to me that it might be related to the SR mechanism, can someone confirm that either way?