Not much wrong with that, at this size anyway.

It would be worth pulling up the shadow detail a bit - if you haven't already, I'd bet there's quite a bit of latitude there.

If you're going to pre-focus, the edge of the grass at the side of the runway isn't a bad choice for the stuff that's coming down the runway centre-line at low level. At the very least, it means that the AF will have very little to do.

Airshows are the only occasion I switch the camera to auto-select the focus point. It means you don't need to nail the passing aircraft to the centre of the frame, which I find almost impossible.

Can't be overemphasised. If you do lose the focus you can get it back very easily, and the closer you can get the ring to the right position, the less the AF has to move it, so the quicker it will lock.

Waste of time except for the static displays maybe.


The worst situation is trying to expose for the aircraft against bright cloud. Blue sky is easy, white cloud is almost impossible. You'll need to overexpose the sky, probably by quite a lot, to avoid hundreds of silhouettes.

Apart from that, look for 1/500 or less for the FJs, and if you want to capture the moment where two fast aircraft are passing head to head, you'll need either split second timing and a stationary camera, or, panning on one only, much, much shorter than that. Otherwise, you'll end up with something like this:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Aviation/Farnborough%202008/IMGP0627.jpg[/IMG]

Had the author even been to an airshow?

I let my PU mag sub lapse mostly because of what I felt was the lightweight nature of the articles. It's a shame to hear that the tradition seems to be continuing.

Oh I see. Yes, Ok. In the sense that anything the camera hasn't actually focused on could be at any distance at all, and hence either within the DOF range or not.

Brick wall or newspaper test, then, as you said.

Noooo!!!

Funniest thread here I've read for quite a while

Coming in a bit late on this one, but just to pick up John's point...

I thought the whole point of a rectilinear lens was that the focus distance refers to the perpendicular distance from the film plane, to a plane (containing the subject), which is parallel to the film plane.

In other words, the focus distance of something at the edge of the field is the same as the focus distance at the centre of the field.

I've tried to illustrate it with this diagram:

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

The fact that the slant distance, ie the distance from the camera to the object at the edge of the frame, is greater than the focus distance, is completely irrelevant - or should be if the optics are perfect.

So if an object is within the DOF at the centre, it should be within it at the edge - and if I understand it right, edge softness is when the optical quality means that reality doesn't match the theory.

If the Ricoh president's statement is really true:
... then I'd have thought that a price drop is at least as likely.

I answered 'Not sure'. I've been thinking about the K-5 for some time now, and as I'm approaching the point where I've saved up enough, I might have to make an actual decision soon

Same reason many of us hesitate, I guess. I'm in much the same position - gagging for better AF and high iso performance.

I've been saving for a while and I'm a few hundred quid short of having enough, but all the bad press has put me off a bit too.

It's natural - who wants to spend a grand on something that doesn't work properly.

I suspect there's something of a sidetone that makes things all the worse - Pentax owners have been the poor relation to N/C for a long time, and the K-5 held out great hope that the balance might be redressed a bit.

It may yet fulfil that hope, but if, as one might infer from the chorus of problems, it's all been something of a QC fiasco, it makes it all the more of a let-down.

Something not quite right about the editing on the first one. There's a distinct halo where green meets blue, so I'm suspecting a little over-aggressive sharpening.

Otherwise, I don't think the small size of these shots here does them any favours - IMO you really need it quite a bit bigger for the detail to be enjoyable. Which is needed, I think, since otherwise there's not much in the way of form or line to maintain interest.

Cor, this thread is a bit of a blast from the past. Good ol' Pete, eh? To think there's a whole generation of new members that didn't share the fun...

On the subject of sharpness settings particularly, though, here's a question.

Suppose I have my JPEG settings set with the sharpness bumped up.

Suppose I also have the camera set to RAW+JPG as I sometimes do when I'm being lazy and just want to use the JPEG without having to do much in the way of post.

Suppose I then opened the RAW file up in Adobe Camera RAW, prior to editing.

The question is this:

Do the camera's JPG settings transfer over to the settings that ACR opens up with by default?

I know I could do some experiments to find out, but I wondered if anyone happened to know offhand.

I totally agree.

300mm is already not long enough at airshows - the last thing I want is for it to be only 200mm.