Probably should be "ME Super" as well.

You can edit posts for a little while after posting them - or is that cheating too?

Yes, I did this, and I learned an important lesson...

... never to try again.

Certainly, my results weren't good.

But with slides, it seems to me that it's not only about being able to expose right, it's also about choosing subjects where the dynamic range in the scene is not too wide.

Otherwise, no matter what exposure you choose, you'll either lose the darks or burn out the brights.

In that respect, I'd say that digital (K10D digital, that is) comes in between the levels of difficulty of slides and prints respectively. I never used to burn out the skies with negative film, even when exposing for back-lit subjects.

Whereas now, I always end up having to pull up the underexposed shadow, having exposed mostly for the sky in the hope of not burning it out.

I usually do, too. However, occasionally the scene itself has been contaminated by something that shouldn't be there.

This, for instance, had a minging sign to the toilets in the way.

So I cloned most of it out - I took the view that the thing that was spoiling the image shouldn't have been in the image in the first place.

Indeed!

Let's see how he gets on at 2400' under the London TMA on a Basic from Farnborough, no auto-pilot, thermals threatening to whoosh you up into CAS any second, one hand on the stick, the other on the camera, one eye looking through the viewfinder, the other one looking out for traffic.

Sour grapes? Moi??

Fab pics mate, very jealous of your office.

I've had much the same experience in the last couple of weeks with two LCD monitors.

I'd been using a Samsung SyncMaster 226BW for some time, which is a 1680x1050 that I've been very happy with, but I had the chance to snap up an almost new LG Flatron E2240 for 60 quid. This is 1920x1080, and it's now my main monitor for work.

They're set up side by side, with Windows 7, and I've calibrated them both with a Huey Pro.

The calibration is better than nothing - but the two monitors are nowhere near the same, and I'm now left with no idea which one to look at when I'm editing photos.

The other thing that's mildly annoying is that each morning, if I've switched the monitors off overnight as I usually do, I have to reapply the saved calibration, since for some reason, it loses it from both monitors (even though the Huey software thinks the calibration is still 'on'). It never needed this when I had just the one monitor.

I would say, though, that having two monitors for work is wonderful. I'm now thinking of getting a cheap second graphics card off the 'bay and getting a third one!

I have a bit of welders glass, which I've used to take photos of the sun (the Venus transit a few years ago, for instance, and an eclipse).

I can imagine it wouldn't be a problem where the lighting isn't too strong, but I got some horrible reflections...

This was how I set up the camera, and this is an example of what I ended up with:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/IMGP1010.jpg[/IMG]

I like the OP's examples.

People do say this, but it's not my experience if you handle it right.

It has a long focus throw, certainly, that is, there's a lot of rotation for the focus ring to do to get from one end of the focus range to the other.

And certainly, if you lose the aircraft and the lens hunts to the far or near point, it will take time to find it again, for this reason.

However, if you're careful, and make good use of the quick-shift to get the ring nearly in the right place, it has very little to do, and locks on as quickly as anything ever does with a Pentax.

Coupled with using the Auto-select setting for the AF-point, which makes it a lot easier to follow the aircraft across the sky, it's fine, albeit a little shorter than I'd like.

I think a 300mm prime would be almost useless at an airshow.

Camera-to-subject distances change so fast, and so continuously, that the zoom is an absolute must.

I had a 400mm prime on a second K10D body at Farnborough a few years back. Even though it was longer than the 55-300 on the main body, after one brief experimental foray, I barely touched it.

Open the window, obviously...

Well, they're not gyroscopes. But yes, having lens IS on as well as body SR is going to give problems.

I had a go at explaining this here.