I'm not entirely sure.

There's no paint on the lens side of the tubes, though, so with the scrapes in place, the contact on the body can get all the way through to the lens.

What I don't understand at all, though, is why you'd need the scrape if there was already a seventh contact. There's no eighth contact on the body.

Now that's very interesting.

7 actual contacts, and the paint-scrape modification. Did it already have the latter, or did you do it?

Look at my Jessop tube - only 6 contacts, and the paint-scrape mod was needed for aperture information to get through.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/Imgp2649s-1.jpg[/IMG]

One application of the Picasa sharpening button usually results in a subtle and pleasing effect, two is always much too much, in my view.

I think your second version is much nicer.

Well said.

The light is good, the contrast with the sky is good. It has hints of interest - the boat, the mountainous shore.

But to me it still seems too much like a crop from something greater.

If you're worried about these, Don, the question has to be asked, what sort of websites do you spend your time visiting?

Not at all disputing this.

I'd agree with this, too ... especially for those whose main purpose here is the forum.

The thing about galleries is that they take time to visit. It's nice to spend an afternoon at a gallery sometimes and look at lots of pictures but it's a very different pastime from what we're mostly engaged in here.

I suppose they're trying to cater for two populations - those that hang out in the forum and those that don't - and those that spend time in both lose out a bit.

Those that just want to see what people visiting the gallery say about their pictures can easily bookmark them and then find them again easily. FAIK there are lots of people that just browse the gallery without spending any time in the forum.

Not sure I entirely follow, George.

I agree up to here (although this section is called "Your Photos forum"), but now you start to lose me.

The trouble with uploading to this section is that there will be those, like me, that have other online galleries, and post pictures elsewhere as well as sharing links with people.

Having to upload them here brings issues with duplication, external linking, and thence to bandwidth issues.

I like linking images here, precisely because it keeps everything in the (two - I'd rather not make it three) online galleries I use, and I can use them elsewhere easily.

Having a specific thread for a C&C picture is good since once it's no longer current it drops off the radar as it should.

Also, I'd be surprised if the dev team particularly like the idea of substantial changes to the search system.

So I'm not sure I see many benefits of such an amalgamation. But maybe I haven't understood you.

I tend to agree with this. Mostly I'm only interested in the recent stuff, anyway, and not often even that.

This has been, and is being, discussed at some length on this thread.

I certainly agree with this based on most of the HDR shots I've seen posted here.

But the tonal range you get from the camera is not itself undistorted, and anyone that uses Shadows/Highlights tool in PhotoShop will know that careful attention, particularly to the shadow areas, can make it look more the way the eye perceives it.

The brain/eye combination, of course, does its own HDR treatment of any scene it looks at - changing the aperture as it looks at differently lit areas, which allows the brain to form an HDR composite of the whole.

As sensor and in-camera software develops to both extend the tonal range of what gets detected, and then how it's output, as Don was saying, all this HDR messing will become even less desirable, and more of a novelty, like many of the PhotoShop filters already are.

High Speed Sync.

When the exposure is shorter than the sync speed, the flash unit emits a burst of flashes during the exposure, so that as the narrowed gap between the shutter curtains travels down, each part of the frame gets lit.

This has practical use when you're using fill-in flash, and with the aperture you want, you need a shorter exposure for the ambient light than the camera's sync speed.