I wasn't so much attacking your use of 'very slight', more trying to calibrate my own expectations.

I never used extreme wide angle lenses (nothing, in fact, shorter than 28mm) in my film days, so I have no idea what was 'normal' in the way of distortions with the lenses that were very wide on 35mm.

So I have nothing to compare with, when I see distortions arising from the use of lenses designed for the 24x16 sensor.

Hmm.

If that's 'very slight', then the barrel distortion of the Tamron 18-250 at the 18mm end would have to be "virtually nonexistent".

Were these distortions equally noticeable with full-frame 35mm, at the focal lengths giving the same AOV as these lenses that are extreme wide angle at 24x16?

The trouble is, none of these is taken wider than 29, nor longer than 92.

If you're going to get a superzoom then you're going to want to use it at the extremes - or at least a lot closer to them than these.

So these shots are Ok as far as they go, but they don't really show anything about its usefulness in the circumstances where it would really count.

Erm. I usually have it in Program Mode, if that's what you mean. Actually it's in User Mode, which is usually Program with a few changes.

I use what it says about the exposure as a starting point, and if I want a different exposure then I change it.

Not sure if this answers the question.

It's almost impossible to get both the Bridge and the Opera House in the same shot if you're on dry land, and between them:




And I ruined most taken from this angle with flare. This was the only salvageable one:

Tell me about it... If I had a quid for every photo I've ruined by burning out the whites....

Although the SOH isn't white, of course, more of a cream colour.

Nope. All of them except the bridge from the zoo (which was the FAJ 75-300) were taken with the DA18-55, IIRC, and the only polariser I had with me was a 72mm which I used with the FA 28-200 some of the time.

Thanks for the comments

The way Clarky's been reminding me of my wonderful holiday back in September, I thought I'd share a few of my photos too. It always amazes me the apparently infinite variation there is in the way different people capture very similar scenes.

The Opera House:







The Bridge...




.. and a less conventional view of it, from the zoo:




Darling Harbour:







.. and parts of the skyline:







Any critique always gratefully received.

You're quite right Dan. Again. (It was you that caught me out with sloppy arithmetic over magnification factors IIRC).

I obviously need to go back to primary school.

From the table at the bottom of the article here, the angle of view with a 300mm lens is about 4.6 degrees.

The moon moves at 360/24 = 15 degrees per hour, or 0.25 degrees per minute, so 0.004 degrees per second.

This might not sound much, but if the moon tracks horizontally across the 3872 pixel wide K10D frame, this represents a blur of 16 pixels.

So an exposure shorter than 1/16 will be a blur smaller than 1 pixel.

At 1/60, the blur will be about a quarter of a pixel, which I doubt you'd see.

It appears to be 1/500s at F8, ISO 560.

There's a free extension for Firefox called "Exif Viewer". Can't recommend it highly enough.

I'd agree with this. The sharpening has been slightly overdone, I think, since noise is starting to become apparent. Might be able to get it slightly better by setting the camera back to neutral sharpness (this gets recorded in the Exif too) and only sharpening (once) on the computer. Although the moon does move very fast, 1/500s is a bit faster than really necessary, so maybe a lower ISO next time would give you a bit less noise.