Ah well, yes, that would have been naughty.

I have an A-50 F2, which I'm planning to get rid of at some point.

It is quite tempting to describe it 100% accurately, as of course I always would, but give it a high BIN, and see if it goes....

You can't fault him on the description. If someone buys it at that price, it's probably a lesson they need to learn.

Terrific.

Seems like a pretty good set of reasons to me.
For a consumer zoom, by all accounts the 55-300 is really very good indeed. I've been very pleased with mine - if you need any additional temptation, have a look at this, and more to the point, this 100% crop from the same picture, taken with a 55-300 and a K10D, not even a K20D.


I think you already have. Welcome.

Especially as his completely pathetic complement of flash guns clearly needs a bit of bulking up.

I used to know a bloke that used this strategy. It was perfect, until one day, the PC's power supply went a bit wrong, and there was a fire inside the case.

Result: two rather charred and unusable hard drives, and everything was gone.

The thing about backup is that the cost of reliability goes up, as you seek to reduce the risk of data loss, and it all comes down to how much you value the data.

No backup: very cheap, and you'll probably get away with it for a long time.

Internal backup: not quite as cheap, and it's a lot better than nothing.

External backup: a bit more expensive again. Now the PC can melt and you've still got everything.

Off-site backup: the minimum for anything that's genuinely important to you and irreplaceable. You may think that the chance of both the PC and the external drive failing at the same time are minimal, but if you get burgled, you'll be ruing the day you thought that.

I've always found Samsung internal drives excellent value and reliability, so I bought two external drive enclosures, and two 1 Tb drives, and spent five minutes putting the drives in the enclosures.

Over USB they're not bad; over e-SATA, AFAICT they're as fast as the drives in the PC - my nightly backup copies about two 70 Mb TIFF files per second.

Obviously, it won't have the robustness of something like this, but if you're careful, and use it as a backup, not as a sole place to store things, I don't see the need for such an expensive solution.

I have a bit of welders glass; I used it to photograph the partial eclipse of the sun in August last year.

It's smaller than yours, but Blutac held it on to the Cokin filter holder really well.

The optical quality, is, however, terrible. Trust me, that is not camera shake.

So don't expect too much !!

Definitely at the bottom end of the "craft sophistication" scale. But he still had to wire them together.

Definitely art too.

Possibly slightly off-topic, I think some of the fish-eye shots in this thread are definitely art.

Even though it pains me to say it, since it disturbs my hitherto fixed (and rather negative) opinion of fisheye photography in general.