I thought trolling was somewhat deprecated these days.
Indeed.

I had a bit of a hoover the first time I wiped a wet, tissue-coated ice-cream spoon across my sensor. So I guess you could call it a clean room.

People, you may think it's a big deal, but it really isn't. Even one as cack-handed as myself has failed to trash a sensor with a wet swab, and (wait for it) I actually dripped the fluid on it myself.

And, with both hands, reversed it and gave a second wipe.

Seriously folks, less of the wimpishness, please. We do more sophisticated wiping in another clean room every day.

Yes, and to me (and in fact I've never questioned the plausibility of the mechanism, just whether it's real or not). Kudos to Canon for being upfront about it.

It still isn't evidence for a real effect in Pentax world. And I certainly won't be changing how I work on the tripod for several reasons:

- Pushing the button with no delay (with or without SR) induces shake anyway which I don't want

- Eliminating shake requires a delayed or remote mode which overrides the SR switch anyway

- Why have wear and tear on the SR switch for no practical reason

And much more to the point...

- I can guarantee to ruin more shots by forgetting to switch SR back on for the hand-held shots

Yes, it would - I only tried up to 100mm when I looked at it all in detail.

No. Ever since SR was introduced with the K10D, they've told you to turn it off, but never said why.

Consequently there's been any amount of anecdotal and speculative muttering about why it might be, and never a shred of actual evidence that might give some actual information.

Just leave it on. You'll never see any difference, and you'll have the additional benefit that there'll be plenty of people out there that will believe you when you claim it's why your pictures aren't sharp

And was it, indeed spot metering?

As John and I have said, it would account for a lot.

Switch to matrix or centre-weighted, and add half a stop of compensation or perhaps a bit more (though I don't use this myself), and I suspect you'll find a dramatic difference.

If you're shooting in JPEG mode, and you don't want to do the sort of processing that Mike has shown you, you might want to bump up the saturation, sharpness and contrast a bit too, if you like your pictures a bit brighter.

Although having said that, even a free (and extremely simple) editor such as Picasa will give you quite a bit of control.

I've never come across EXIF data being wrong. Although I'm also a bit puzzled by the fact that some of the data is missing.

It does say that Spot metering was used, which, as John says, will often account for this sort of thing - the sea is a lot brighter than the subject, so if the camera exposed for a spot of sea, it's not at all surprising that the foreground is underexposed.

However, the missing and/or unreliable EXIF isn't going to get you anywhere. Download PhotoMe and use it to find out for sure (with some test shots whose settings you check carefully) whether the camera is recording what it did accurately. You're not going to get anywhere until then.

And not all real men are equal. The real, real men do it with fingers from both hands, not one hand.

No wussy short, round the hand, circuit for us. No, it's got to be right across the chest for maximum enjoyment.

I'll tell you what ain't an urban myth...

You can get a bloody painful electric shock off a (edit: old) flashgun if the meter probes slip when you're trying to measure the voltage across the contacts.

It was an old Cobra hammerhead of some description. My arm ached for quite a while after

Yes, exactly my findings. That's why I'm always interested in any claims to the contrary.

'IS' you say? Which brand did you go to in the end? Isn't IS what Canon call their SR? Presumably that's lens-based IS rather than sensor-based (not that it probably makes much difference)?

Let me expand a little on why I'm asking this...

If you release the shutter with any of the delayed modes, or with the remote (wireless, anyway, I'm not 100% sure about wired), then the camera turns the SR off anyway, regardless of the SR switch position.

If you release the shutter using your finger on the button, the situation is more interesting, cos there are two very clear effects that can be easily demonstrated:

The first is simply that using your finger will wobble the camera, no matter how careful you are, and this induces shake. I had a reasonably careful look at this on the K10D, and my conclusion was that if you press the button with your finger, it generates shake that the SR can't remove. But this shake was no more or less than the shake that ended up in the image if you did it with SR off.

So I'm not at all surprised that, if you pressed the shutter release button to take the picture with no delay, you saw some shake - especially at such a long focal length as 500mm.

What this does not, however, prove, is that it was the SR mechanism that generated the shake in the first place.

The second effect is that the SR has to be stabilised. If it's not yet stabilised (ie, hand symbol in the viewfinder), then all bets are off. Unstabilised SR is often a lot worse than no-SR, and of course, camera-on-the-tripod is one of those cases where we often don't look through the viewfinder at the point of shutter release.

So again, unless you took care to ensure that the hand symbol was showing, I wouldn't be surprised by any amount of shake.

Again, though, it doesn't prove that the SR system starts generating shake when there's none to detect.

As I always point out when I climb on this particular hobby horse, I have no axe to grind about this, and I'm more than willing to change my mind as soon as there's some good evidence.