It's very unlikely that there will ever be any desirable Pentax gear on eBay that quite a lot of people here aren't watching.

It's a big ol' place, the internet

There's a difference between actual sharpness and apparent sharpness.

Inevitably, making an image smaller removes detail, if the detail is there to start with. So a bigger image, properly sharpened, may look more detailed than a smaller one, also properly sharpened, simply because it is.

Against that, there's the increase in apparent sharpness that you get by simply making lines and other details narrower, which is what happens when you resize down.

So there are conflicting effects, and they're not always entirely predictable.

Getting to the bottom of whatever's causing this will be the key to it for you, I think.

There shouldn't be any sudden change in quality at any arbitrary size, if the software you're using is up to the job.

It's a mistake, though, to let the forum do any resizing at all. Resizing once, sharpening carefully for that size, and then letting the forum scale it again is bound to give you a worse result than sizing and sharpening for the 800px max.

Unless of course, you aren't bothered that the forum scaling makes it worse, and your intention is for people to click on the image and see it in a different tab at its original size. That's a valid approach too, since it at least gives us the opportunity to see it in all its bigger glory. I quite like that, although not everyone will click to open a new tab.

There is no point trying to compare two images of different original sizes that the forum software then resizes differently.

Looking at the originals, the second looks sharper, certainly, but it's smaller, so you'd expect it to, so again, hard to compare.

I think perhaps it's a little different when you're a pro, giving for nothing what you normally charge for. When it's your living, and it's clear to the recipient of the gift that you spent time on them, that you could have been using to earn money for yourself.

In that respect it's clear what the dollar value of the gift is, although it's perhaps rubbing their nose in it a little to give them an actual gift certificate. If I give someone a present, I don't leave the price tag on it to show them how expensive it was.

But different strokes for different folks, I guess.


For an amateur the 'value', as such, is less clear. Giving up a weekend or two that you would otherwise have spent doing something else, has no dollar value as such, since it's your spare time that you've given freely.

I may be completely wrong, but somehow I sense that the OP is taking out his frustration with himself (for not making things clear up front) and with the guest that trashed his lens, (Edit: and with his wife, for stitching him up ) on the friends whose wedding he's shot for them as a gift.

Making the friends responsible, even in some 'token' way, for the damage to the lens, is just wrong, to my mind. It wasn't their fault, so suck it up, instead of trying to get them to pay for what they didn't break.

If it's a gift, perhaps it should be given a little more freely.

If it's not a gift, make it clear.

I'm not clear what the issue is, here.

You refer to them sometimes as friends, sometimes as clients.

You did the work for free (apart from the printing costs), yet you think you're being ripped off.

If you had no intention of making money out of the work, you'll make no less, even in the rather unlikely event of them selling the pictures without your permission, rather than giving them away, as you imply in your reference to "general distribution". If you're happy for 40 images to be generally distributed, why not another 78?

So you're not being ripped off as far as I can see.

The lens breakage is unfortunate, but irrelevant - it's not reasonable to include your irritation from that in your feelings towards your friends/clients, since that is between you and the culprit.

You may think you're being asked to give more time to the project than is reasonable, but that's not the same thing at all - all you need to do is refuse, or at least explain the enormous amount of time and effort required to edit the pictures to a level suitable for distribution, which you don't really want to do for free.

Either of which will be difficult, of course, because the root problem is that their expectations are different from yours, and it's too late to fix that without the risk of bad feeling.

I don't really know what the answer is, but I suspect at the root of it will be to decide whether, in this respect, they're friends or clients. I don't think they can be both.

I think my inclination would be (if you like them enough, maybe you don't) to give them the pictures they want (possibly at low res, as Matt suggests), as an extra present. Ask them not to sell them, though, since the copyright is still yours. If they're friends, I hardly think it's likely they'll sell them without permission.

That's not very nice if it's really the generalisation it seems.

I've done two weddings in my time. Each time it was for good friends who were very hard up, and couldn't afford a pro. They couldn't afford a reception either, which was held in a church hall with food prepared for free by other friends, and music played live for free by yet more friends.

I was pleased to work for them for nothing, and their pleasure in the pictures was payment enough.

This is the thing.

When someone uses a telescope to get pictures as good as this, it spoils the whole "strain at the very limits of sensor / lens / focus / steady tripod / careful post-process" game...

... that we merrily toil away at with only a camera and a proper (!) lens.

I recently got my Sigma 600mm mirror lens cleaned on the inside, so I might have a go with that if there's some clear sky tonight. It's been a while since I put myself through all the "I reckon I'll be able to feel my fingers for about 5 more minutes, that's plenty of time yet" lark.

Not liquid oxygen!! You'd need much higher pressures or much lower temperatures to keep LOX liquid. And you'd also risk some exciting fires - liquid oxygen is a very strong oxidising agent.

These days, the propellants in aerosol cans are usually volatile hydrocarbons, which will liquefy at room temperature and moderate pressure.

It was so bad I couldn't bear to use the camera until I sorted it.

I think a big wuff of pollen-laden air must have happened just when I changed lenses at some point - the dust on the sensor got really bad almost overnight.

Any mark in exactly the same place on many frames indicates crap on the sensor. Sometimes the sensor-shaker in the camera fails to dislodge it, and you have to resort to other methods.

1. You can try to blow it out, using a rocket blower (not canned air. since these risk squirting solvents all round the inside of the camera). Some people avoid this method on the grounds that it risks blowing more crap into the camera as well as out of it.

2. You can use an arctic butterfly, which is a brush that is charged electrostatically by spinning, and then is wiped (when no longer spinning!!) over the sensor to remove the dust or in your case hair, the crap then sticking to the brush.

3. You can use one of several wet cleaning systems, such as the solvent/swab approach available here, or Pentax's own kit.


I reckon that if your mark is a hair, it won't be stuck too hard, so the arctic butterfly will work a treat. However, they are expensive, but so are all the solutions.

It's a lot easier than you'd think to do it - don't be tempted to take it to some random shop who will charge you an arm and a leg and won't do a better (or more careful) job than you'll do yourself.

I was quite nervous before using the swab method (having already bought an arctic butterfly which failed) to remove huge amounts of well-stuck-on dust (probably pollen), but it worked quite well after two goes, and it was quite easy in the end. Although the arctic butterfly didn't touch the muck in that pic, I have used it succesfully with the occasional large lump of stuff that isn't stuck too hard. I don't use the rocket blower any more.

Good luck.

Yes, me too. Or the 3s delay with the IR remote.

The one thing I would like to try, as I say, is a cable release. There is a hint of ambiguity in the K10D manual, where it says:

[quote="K10D manual"]... SR automatically turns of in the following circumstances:

Self-timer, 2s self-timer, remote control shooting, 3s delay shooting, bulb shooting, or wireless mode with external flash[/quote]At a stretch of the imagination, you could just about interpret this as implying that with a cable release (as distinct from an IR remote), it doesn't switch off.

Please could someone with one, plug it in and see whether SR switches off automatically or not?

Yes, me too again, many times. I've lost quite a few grab shots that way...

Well you'd be a lot better off leaving it on then.

Lots of people have speculated along Prieni's lines...
... and it is superficially plausible.

However, no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a shred of actual evidence supporting such claims, in the nearly three years I've been following the discussions on the topic. If someone cares to lend me a cable release that's K10D compatible (or better still, give me one for Christmas ), I'll repeat the experiment I reported some time ago.

In the meantime, I continue to leave the SR switch in the 'on' position, tripod or not.