Neil, some terrific aircraft shots on your website.

Would you say a few words about how you go about airshow photography?

My break wasn't quite as long as yours, but I went from film (ME Super) to digital (K10D) a little over a year ago.

One thing caught me by surprise regarding exposure. In my film days I used to zoom in (or get very close if I was using a prime) to effectively spot meter on the part of the frame I was interested in.

This worked very well for backlit subjects.

With digital, I find this approach tends to overexpose the background so much that it can easily ruin the whole shot, and I have to compensate for that more than I used to have to with film (boosting the shadow areas on the computer where necessary, for instance).

If you have a wall behind them, this may well not be a specific problem for you, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. Good luck anyway.

Well. Considering that the light and the sky are fairly uninteresting, this sort of photo stands or falls on its composition.

The grass, the beach, the water line and the waves all provide a set of converging lines that quite pleasingly draw the eye to the curving cliff line at the end of the beach... and thence to the far coast and the island.

The vignetting from the 18-55 is apparent, but inoffensive, and there's nothing annoying in the shot.

All things considered, it's not at all bad. Not stellar, but those conditions don't lend themselves to stellar photographs.

Well, fair enough. Certainly if the only prices you were aware of were as much as you say, I can see your point.


I did not say you were a scammer.

I said "in these days of scammers and time-wasters, a little suspicion is natural".

In general, it is a friendly forum. However, people are quite naturally put off by aggression, and the strident tone of some of your posts certainly comes across as aggressive to me.

In the past there have been one or two that have joined, and reacted very angrily and defensively to reasonable feedback, and then blamed others for what they then saw as their unfriendly reception.

I suggest you take Clarky's excellent advice.

People here are generally pretty friendly; it can be seen as slightly cliquey sometimes, since there are quite a few in-jokes that won't mean much until you've been here long enough to get to know folk a little.

But if you read this thread again carefully, you'll see that there's been no actual criticism of you - just a little suspicion, which is natural in these days of scammers and time-wasters.

It is unusual for someone very new to the forum to be selling three identical lenses, claiming them to be cheap, when in fact they are expensive.

It is also unusual for someone very new to the forum to suggest that they are new to photography, and have very few lenses, when they're clearly experienced in buying and selling Pentax gear.

I have no axe to grind here, and I have no reason to believe or disbelieve what you say - but perhaps you might consider giving people the same benefit of the doubt as you expect for yourself.

I can assure you that people are not met here with suspicion unless they give some reason for it - no matter how innocent those reasons turn out to be.

Welcome, anyway. I hope you enjoy whatever set of kit you end up with.

I would recommend changing your designated 'birthday present coordinator'.

Your present one is rubbish..

Unless these are the Mark 2, this is expensive.

Are you aware that they're available new for £29 at SRS, which is very highly thought-of here?

I just happened upon this Firefox add-in

My first impression wasn't great, since when you click on an image to magnify, it pixellated the thumbnail. But when I noticed the progress bar across the bottom and realised it was loading the full image, I realised how nice it is.

The 'wall' view of whichever gallery you're viewing is slightly gimmicky but not at all bad for all that.

It also has a slideshow mode, where those of us that loathe slideshows can click quickly through it as well as letting it transition on its own.

I really like it so far - works perfectly with PhotoBucket and Picasa web albums; haven't tried it yet with anything else.

I've never understood this.

Why is it any more difficult to use the WB and other tools with a JPG than it is with a RAW?

Once you've got the picture into whatever editing app you're using, there's no difference that I can see.

I know that with Photoshop, for instance, you can do quite a bit of that in Adobe Camera Raw, before opening the image in PS itself, but I haven't yet seen any distinct advantage of this.

Most people tend to recommend RAW, since it's sometimes possible to extract more detail from a RAW file than the corresponding JPEG. However, to achieve this requires care with the exposure, and sufficient editing technique (and software, of course) to take advantage of it. For most purposes there's nothing wrong with JPEG.

However, if you're going to use JPEG, there's no advantage at all in using anything less than the K10D's full 10 MP.

SD cards are so cheap these days that there's just no point.