Feeling vaguely offended when the word 'fanboy' is used, nothing at all to do with owning and talking about gear.

Probably not supposed to post like this on classified threads, but I can very much vouch for Brian's bona fides.

I shall, with considerable regret, be selling the lens I bought from him, several years ago now, in the not too distant future, but I wouldn't hesitate to trade with him again, and nor should anyone else.

I crop first too. There's no point doing, for instance, a levels adjustment and then chopping off half of what the adjustment was applied to.

The final sharpening though, should be applied after the final image has been resized for whatever output medium it's intended for. This is because the amount of sharpening depends on the size of the output.

If I'm going to apply any noise reduction, I usually do that immediately after the final resize, but before the final sharpening. A lot of noise just disappears when the image is downsampled, so again, the amount of NR depends on how big the final output is to be.

The 50 is the biggest one they do, but it's not quite big enough for the 50-500 with the lens hood on as well.

You can put the hood on the wrong way round and just about get it in, but then it's a really tight fit at the bottom. I stow the hood separately.

I use this with the K-5 and 50-500.

@Mike - how does the K-5II with the 50-500, compare with the original Mk 1 K-5, focusing-wise?

Trying to gauge how much better the K-3 will be with it, than the K-5

Unfortunately, they won't.

The majority won't care. Revolutions only happen when the majority feels oppressed.

Vocal minorities can be suppressed and the majority won't give a damn.

I've probably mentioned this elsewhere, but I ruined a whole roll of film walking in the Lake District, by using one of those extendable rubber lens hoods at the wrong length - the prints came back and the vignetting was awful.

However, now that they're scanned, a little cropping and some of the shots weren't too bad.

Still have some left

But I have about 20 on the go, so none depletes too fast

Thanks. The patience comes and goes if I'm honest.

The biggest problem was the racket from the scanner - although I got used to it initially, it gradually bored its way into my brain and stopped me working. But now I've set up a PC in the other room (hence the Windows 8.1 reference) so I just hear a click at the end of each strip.

I figure that if I can chip away at it, doing even a few strips a day, I'll still get a lot more done than if I leave it completely for months at a time and then go mad for a few days.
I certainly have, along with all my digital stuff (mostly also dross, mind you). Currently on to 2 external hard drives of which one is off site at any one time.

8000 to go, 70 MB per TIFF, that's a bit over half a terabyte. I have about the same already, and I daresay I'll accumulate a lot more digital images. I reckon the two 2TB drives I have will keep me going for a while.

About 20% of 10000 negs - my whole life from 1984 to 2007. I haven't done any for quite a while, but one of my NYRs was to get started again.

Mostly dross, as you'd expect, but a few real gems and lots of priceless memories. I don't have the prints, so every strip is a surprise