It hadn't escaped me.

All joking apart, I don't think you have to be a chicken to know an egg's bad.

I've had an exchange of views recently with someone who seems to take the position that unless one has posted good photos, one isn't entitled to judge those of others.

Personally I think this is nonsense, but, that said, it wouldn't be surprising to discover that a good critic was also an artist.

I'd probably go as far as to think that you can't be an artist without being a critic.

The suspense is approaching Benjikan proportions

Or, bizarrely, unless you use Picasa, which, although in its current version, displays and allows you to work with PEFs, seems not to be able to read the EXIF data in them.

I know, I know... you get what you pay for...

Yes, but on the inside as well, surely?

(Welcome back !)

I had no idea so I went to peek. I won't say, of course... other than that even now I know what it is, I still have no idea

EDIT:

Ah. I've looked at the right one now. Ok. I would never have got that. It's not that obvious to me even with the full frame

It's very easy to check. Just press the INFO button when the camera's in Capture mode (ie not Playback mode). The 'hand' icon is greyed out and has a line through it when it's set to the 2s timer, but not when it isn't.

It's disabled in both self-timer modes, and both remote modes.

Incidentally, this is a very good example of how difficult it is sometimes to really test things properly.

You had out-of-focus shots, switched off the SR, and then got in-focus shots. Not unreasonably, you deduced that it was SR causing the problem.

Now we know that if you really were using the 2s timer, and there's nothing wrong with the camera, the SR was off all the time, so wasn't the cause of the original lack of focus.

I'm absolutely NOT criticising you for making this mistake - I'd probably have drawn the same wrong conclusion if I hadn't happened to know that the remote modes switch off the SR, but I do think it shows just how easy it is for urban myths to get about.

I haven't seen any evidence of tripod-mounted SR causing problems. But that is almost certainly because I haven't done any long exposures on the tripod without using one of the self-timed or remote options.

I think this is actually a very hard one to test - since to find out if SR causes problems, you have to physically press the button, and it's virtually impossible to do this without disturbing the tripod.

EDIT:

I suppose if you had a very long exposure (many seconds), any initial shake from physically pressing the button would be unnoticeable, and if there was still evidence of shake (not accounted for by focus problems), maybe it would be evidence of prolonged sensor movement during the exposure.

But this is one where life's too short, and the benefits too few, to warrant the science.

Do you know of any suppliers of the filter-to-filter type reversing adaptors?

There are hordes about with the bayonet one side and filter the other, for reversing a lens directly on to the camera mount, but I haven't seen the type that you're presumably using.

A few from today. Not sure they'd enlarge much, to be honest, but it was a fun bit of practice in some very welcome sunshine. Comments always appreciated.

Let that be a lesson to ya...