How can you do this to me?????

Telling me this when it's more than 8 hours before I can try it....

I'll be fidgeting about all day with anticipation now...

Why is black better?

I had a bit of a poke about... found http://www.temptedimages.co.uk/.. to my eye this one looks nowhere near as good - cliched poses, tacky by comparison with the other one (judging just by the web site). So the quality clearly does vary, I guess.

A friend of mine is getting married soon and knows that I'm interested in photography. She's come across this up-market photographic studio that does makeover shoots for women... www.foryoureyesonly.me.uk

And wants to know if they're any good.

I'd never heard of them... does anyone know anything about them?

TIA

No, not at all Pete... really. I was grinning as I typed, honest!!

I do think your Photoshop skills are coming on in leaps and bounds, and they're way more advanced than mine.

That's all it is. I don't like it. I hate the whole approach.

I think (a) it's dishonest (whole new thread there!!) but more to the point, (b) it's sloppy, because the convenience of the sodding about in software lets you ignore details relating to authenticity.

I made the point about the relationship between the clouds and the water - it's visually more interesting than the bland sky in the original but it isn't authentic. You might just as well stick an alien spaceship in to make it more interesting - it's content, but that's all, and it erodes the whole point of photography to my mind, which is to capture a moment in time and space that you were there to see, but which no one else was.

You may remember I posted this picture of an aerobatting Yak 50

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/IMGP3019-1.jpg

Someone said it would look better turned round - missing completely as I said in response, that the control surfaces would then be completely wrong for the manoeuvre it was doing. Another example of how being able to quickly change things means you lose the essence of the image.

But this is just my view. You're not required to agree, and the fact that I don't like what you do doesn't mean that you should change what you do.

Keep at it, mate, fair play to you.

But mine is.

Not only because I'm still grumpy that SDM doesn't stand for stop down metering, which doesn't appear to be fixed in Firmware 1.2, I'll say this:

Notwithstanding the fact that it requires no little skill with Photoshop to achieve this, not to mention patience (and credit to Pete for his obvious improvement)... my reaction to all this is...

Yuk, yuk, yuk, yukkety yuk, YUK.

Crappy snap? Who cares!!

If the background is dull and devoid of content, stick a few clouds in nicked from a better shot. No matter that if there's low cumulus like that, chances are that it'll be windier than it obviously was, which would result in the water being obviously choppier. Reality (or even realism) be damned!!

Bird in the wrong place because you don't have the patience to capture it in the right place? Who cares, just move it over a bit.

Still no interest in the scene? No probs... just chop all the colour out of the scene and paint a couple of foreground items in a nice bright colour so as to distract attention from the rest of the picture.

When we were kids we had painting by numbers kits, where if we were patient and coloured inside the lines, we got a picture that looked like we could paint. We had "join the dots" books that made it look like we'd made a picture.

But the truth was, we couldn't paint, and we couldn't draw.

It's photography, Jim, but not as we know it...

The point is, how much do you deprive yourself of, for how long?

If all you want to do is tripod-mounted landscapes, fair enough, I guess. It just doesn't compute for me, as I said. I held off getting a DSLR for a long time since the K10D didn't exist, and everything else just wasn't enough to get into digital.

If all I wanted to do was wide angle landscapes, I'd probably have stuck with my 5MP Sony compact and Photoshop.

Or my ME Super.

One of the most wonderful things about the K10D is the shake reduction, and the resolution, since it lets me hand hold, with long, old slow MF lenses, and then crop aggressively to get just what I want.

I would happily give up every autofocus lens to keep them.

If you're thinking about accumulating expensive lenses, but at the same time sacrificing having a K10D, then I think you're nuts.

Polite nuts, I hasten to add, not rude nuts. Each to his own. I just can't compute this one, is all.

Especially if you could still reduce the intensity of the built in unit, effectively using (almost) exclusively the slave units.

Well yes, I wasn't thinking you could do all that with 20 year old bits

Do you suppose they might put "switch off preflash" (and any consequences of that) in a firmware update?