Perfectly true.

But you don't have to do this, and if you're motivated to learn, you probably won't.

Nor I.

However, it is well-known that firing the shutter before the SR has stabilised can lead to much worse images than not having the SR on at all.

So I could just about stretch my imagination to the possibility that if you were a bit ham-fisted with the button, caused a lot of shake with your finger, and then the SR didn't have time to stabilise, you'd get an image with more shake in it than if you'd had the SR off in the first place.

I didn't see evidence of that in the experiments I did - I got the same amount of finger-induced shake whether the SR was on or off, but it's a possibility I can't completely rule out.

Which is not to say at all that it's anything to do with what people claim - namely that some feedback loop is actually putting shake in when the sensor actually started out stationary.

I leave mine on all the time. All the delayed modes switch it off automatically, in any case.

Sure. But the instruction books (K-5 and before, I don't know about more recent ones) do not say that having SR on causes shake.

That's just people's interpretation, and as I say, I've read lots of claims, but seen not a single shred of evidence supporting it, and found none myself when I looked quite carefully.

When I used to follow the instructions in this respect, I lost more photos by forgetting to turn the SR back on, than I ever might have (in my imagination) by leaving it on in the first place.

So I thought "hmm, I wonder, do I really need to follow these instructions?"

And concluded that I didn't. Each to his own, though.

You're very much not alone!! I've felt the same, with rare exceptions, about my own photography for nearly 30 years.

In this case, I'd say that there's no particular subject. The foreground and background are both very leafy, giving an overall over-busy effect with nothing really to look at. In particular, when you try to look into the background, it's all more of the same.

Whereas when you're there, you can look around the scene and admire different aspects of it - much harder with a 2D representation.

If it's any consolation, I have hundreds of images like this. Nicely exposed, but otherwise forgettable.

Cut out clutter, is the only thing I'd say. Clutter distracts.

Two reasons:

1. Academic interest.
2. The avoidance of misinformation.

Like that hogwash about damage in the article, and the recent nonsense about raw files containing the pixel locations of image noise.

People see things written down, and believe them. Then they interpret them, and then reproduce them with their own interpretations... and it becomes increasingly difficult to separate fact from myth.

In the manuals it just says switch it off - and unless they've changed the wording in the ones since the K-5, there's nothing about SR-induced shake.

For all we know, it's advised so that you can press the shutter and not have to worry about the SR-stabilisation delay.

No Pentax lens has an IS system.

All Pentax dSLRs since the K10D and K100D have had sensor-shift shake reduction, apart from, I believe, the K110D which did not.

I would take anything that article says with a big pinch of salt, given that it says this:

The notion that having lens-IS and body-SR on at the same time can cause damage is complete baloney.

The Pentax SR system does not detect movement of the image across the sensor - it detects body movement. So there is no possibility of feedback from the one affecting the other.

And the body-SR detects the movement whether the lens-IS is on or not, unless there's some clever new electronics that knows whether certain lenses have their IS on.

The reason not to have them both on at the same time is that by moving the sensor, the body-SR will put back in what the lens-IS has just taken out (since the body assumes that camera movement is causing blur, so it moves the sensor in an opposite sense).

Incidentally, I've heard this claim that the SR system causes its own shake when the camera is on a tripod many times over the years, and FAIK it may be true of other brands' lenses, but I've never seen a shred of reliable evidence that it's true with Pentax. I know what the manuals all say, but I've never seen any of the effect people infer from that in reality.

I did some careful tests on all this a long time ago, and the shake caused by releasing the shutter with a finger was much greater than anything I could observe that might have been sensor-induced shake.

That's why we should use the mirror-up function on a tripod if possible.

Usually when people claim they've seen SR-induced shake, they've taken the picture before the SR has stabilised, and as MattMatic showed, years ago, the result can be worse than not having the SR on at all.

I wouldn't stress about leaving SR on.

I think it will boil down to how much time the OP has available.

If I had a lot of spare time, and a nearby darkroom with good availability where I could practise and experiment in peace and quiet, as an ex-chemist I think I might quite like learning how to develop and print B&W.

That's a long, long way, though, from learning about photography by sticking a roll of film in a camera, taking some pictures (hopefully writing down in a notebook exactly what was done for each and every frame) and then taking it down to Boots to get the prints, or whatever you do these days.

If the OP has the time and patience for the former, I think it would be an enriching experience. The latter IMO is just a recipe for endless frustration.

If the objective is to learn the old skills, which I'm sure would be enjoyable in their own right, all well and good.

But if it's to learn about photography, with limited time, then I agree with Peter.

Technically, they aren't in fact giving it away for free.

However, by removing the option to buy their software and insisting on the rental model, they deserve what they get IMO.

The noise isn't in the same place each time. Real noise is random.

There's fixed-pattern noise... where different pixels have different responses.

This is what you can get rid of by dark frame subraction.

But real noise you can't - you have to average it out over multiple exposures, where the actual signal (which is there in the same place every time) eventually predominates over the noise (which isn't).

Disclaimer: I know nothing about fixed pattern noise except what I just Googled.