You're very kind, George, as are the others that have complimented me on that picture.

And I am quite pleased with it, I must say.

But I wouldn't put it down to too much more than, if not beginner's, then intermediate's, luck. I'd spent five hours cursing the weather which made avoiding silhouettes difficult, and then, right at the end of the display, the cloud had thickened up while still allowing enough in the way of gaps for the sun to illuminate it just right.

The best I could do was see the shot coming, and try to frame it right. I took your advice and recropped it slightly.

When I can produce good pictures as reliably as people like Lilly, Prieni, Pschute, Simonkit, and quite a few others, maybe I'll start to feel a bit less like I fluked the occasional good ones.

Even with UAC off? (Not that I have any plans to run it on Vista - just curious.)

Excellent, thanks very much.

The install seems to create a shortcut to GX10_DebugControlEng.exe, although the installed program file is called GX10_DebugControl.exe.

Only takes a second to fix though, and the buttons in English are most reassuring.

I didn't know there was an English version of the 'get into debug even with 1.3' Russian app.

Is there a link to it somewhere that I've missed?

I thought I could see a very fine speckling, but getting up close to the monitor, I realise it's the grain from the monitor's pixels I was seeing. These are more obvious in the darker parts of a photo, as is actual noise.

I don't think they're noisy, except possibly a little in the very dark areas, like the child's hair.

I'm sorry, I'm simply not going trawling through 18 months of posts just to save you the trouble of going to the forum search page, typing 'IMG' into the keywords field and 'ChrisA' into the Author field.

I expect if you do that, you'll find any number of pictures I've posted at various times and for various purposes.

Some of the pictures probably won't display, since despite our requests to the site owners, we can't edit posts to fix broken links.

And anything I posted before about April would have been edited for display on a very old, dark monitor, so many of them probably look overexposed and noisy on a modern LCD monitor.

Still, feel free to laugh and point. There's plenty to criticise, so fill your boots if you like.

One of the things I discovered at Farnborough the other week was that having the AF set to Auto works extremely well for this - the camera can choose an alternate AF point quickly enough to compensate for my inability to track accurately, so it's much better at keeping a lock than when it's forced to use only the centre spot.

For all the criticism I've read about Pentax's allegedly sub-standard AF, I was very happy with its performance over the day.

I do, and I don't know why you keep banging on about this.

I expressed an opinion of your picture. Less diplomatically than I might, perhaps, but nevertheless I expressed it.

I'm not interested in proving to you that I'm worthy to have an opinion, and I'm not suggesting that if you like to sharpen pictures beyond realism that it's wrong. Your HDR style is beyond realism too, which is perfectly fine, and as it happens, I quite like it - HDR when it tries to be natural but fails, is awful, I think, but HDR as impressionistic art can be very attractive, and I think some of yours is.

But let's remember where this started - and I'll try and explain why I reacted the way I did.

You posted your tiger picture in the context of using manual focus for creating "the desired result in the circumstances". I don't see how the picture illustrates your point, other than an example of how manual focus can achieve a sharp result.

Except that the sharpness of that result is nothing to do with manual or automatic focus - it was achieved on the computer, and I happen to think it's oversharpened. Just my preference, nothing more. Not wrong, not right, just my preference. And I think you'll find there's nothing in Ben Kanarek's comment that precludes people having preferences.

Hope this clarifies things.

Do you know why it's different for different lenses, Matt?

If it's a show stopper for you, and you can afford to jump, and there aren't any different show stoppers for you with another brand, it may well be best for you.

Only you can say, really.