There are bulb blowers, and bulb blowers. The wussy ones are probably no use at all, and even with the rocket blower that I use, I find I have to get the nozzle right in there - so it's fully charged battery, mirror up, and a careful braced holding position, so that nothing moves except the dust when I give the thing a good hard squeeze.

Yes. I really like them both. The Sigma for its lightness and quick AF, and the Pentax for its better optics. I say better, but that's not to say the Sigma is bad, although it has a lot more CA than the Pentax wide open. Stopped down a bit it's hard to tell them apart.

No.

I just had a look at http://www.sigma-imaging-uk.com/, and it seems that they don't make any 400mm telephoto any more. They do a 500mm, but not in a Pentax mount.

They do turn up on eBay.co.uk quite frequently, but as with a lot of the Pentax-fit A- and post-A- lenses, prices have been going up.

There were three over the summer, the first two of which I missed, and the third one I managed to win, but for more than I'd hoped.

If you can find an FA* 400 I'd trade...

They probably don't believe that there's actually a place called "Whanganui".

Well, well.

Flash and music.

Seems everyone's doing it these days...

Sure. I go out through my back door into the garden. I find I can usually park in my garage... and if you wanted to drop in for a cup of tea, there's space for another car outside.



If they're arriving on the northerly runway, it's about one mile, rather than a half-mile away, which is too far, really. But pretty much anywhere about that distance south of the approach would do, from about 5 miles out to the east of the airport and closer.

Edit: on reflection, you'd have to get a lot closer to the approach line if you were much closer to the airport, since it's very built up, and they're lower of course, the closer they get. There are bound to be loads of vantage points, but they'd take some scouting around to find them.

Not especially interesting subject matter for those that aren't aviation enthusiasts, but the light was nice yesterday morning and I hadn't taken any pictures for a week or more.

Range was about a half-mile, the aircraft were on final for runway 27L at Heathrow at a height of about 1200 feet.

Boeing 757



Airbus A340



Boeing 747-436



Airbus A319(?)



This last one isn't as sharp; as you can see from the full frame, though, it's an aggressive crop (the others were at least 2/3 of the frame, the 747 more than that):

I'd be interested in this too.

All I've seen of the advertisements is that anything with higher resolution than VGA is very expensive. It all seems a bit of a retrograde step, really, for viewing photos... especially ones that are any good.

I got my 30 free prints from Photobox recently, and I was very pleased with the quality. Not convinced there's anything 'modern' that improves on prints yet.

There's no way I'd swap from body to lens - body is just so convenient.

But I've wondered if it makes framing easier hand-held at long focal lengths. If the subject almost fills the K10D frame at, say 400mm, you do have to kinda do the best you can, and hope.

That said, it very rarely misses.

I grew up with these (only ever owned Pentax), and never ever had to learn how to work with the other systems. I assumed they were all like that until a lot later...

Stuff it in, wind it on. Never once had a failure in 20 years, although I never really understood how it gripped..

Always did the first one before closing the back though.