I agree with you here Alan. I tried looking at it with and without the suggested crop, but the sky seems too cramped without the dark cloud.

I'm not an expert in these things, but it seems to me that the symmetry in shots like this makes a closer-to-central horizon than the RoT would suggest more pleasing. Often, for instance, if the water is perfectly still, a central horizon can look marvellous if there's sky and foreground interest.

I like the second one best too. I particularly like the way the tree isn't in the immediate foreground, which would be what you expect, but set a little way back. The stones in the immediate foreground provide interest and lead on to the tree, just a little differently from a lot of shots like this.

The first one, while very nice, strikes me as just a teensy bit contrived.

The colours seem a little unnatural - not in itself a bad thing - but the foreground seems unnconnected with the background.

Where is it? I'll be in the area in a couple of weeks time.

Actually, I also like the one of the guy with 'Acorns' on his shirt, balancing on his pedals.

It's different, I love the light, I have no idea how he got there, or where he went. But it's a moment captured, different from many other moments I've seen, and it has a freshness and originality about it that I'd like to see more of.

I've seen hundreds of slanty pictures of cars, trucks etc, driving fast round a track with varying degrees of sharpness. Frankly, there's nothing original about them. To catch the attention of the viewer, they have to show an unusual amount of detail, or convey an unusual sense of movement.

None of them is the least bit remarkable, in all honesty.

However...

Of all the ones I saw at that link, the one I liked the best was the profile pic of the cyclist at the top of his jump.

It's not stunningly sharp, but everything else about it is stunning.

It's an excellent capture, at an excellent instant.

It may do well with some judicious editing to make it look even better.

But I wouldn't patronise the OP with advice about cropping or sharpness - I'm sure he's capable of looking at his own, and forming his own view of whether they look crisp and composed. In all those pictures, some are, some aren't.

But the cyclist is terrific.

More like that please

Not for a moment denying people's right to spend their money on whatever they like, nor indeed begrudging those with tons more of it than me

But I'm quite interested to hear what specific features those that are desperate for a 35mm sensor are actually wanting.

I do get the idea that with a bigger sensor it's much easier to achieve shallow depth of field with wide angle lenses, and I'd agree it would be nice to be able to do that.

But the other so-called advantages seem a lot less compelling to me - a brighter viewfinder doesn't seem that much of an advantage now that we use AF most of the time. And the high ISO/low noise advantage seems to have been offset somewhat by the latest generation of sensors.

A little arithmetic as illustration for this last point...

A 35mm sensor has area 36x24 = 864 square mm.
An APS-C one has 24x16= 384 square mm.

That's 2.25 times the area, so all other things being equal(number of pixels, inter-pixel gap etc), that's a bit over twice the area per pixel.

So if they stuck to the K-5's 16 MP, without any other advances in sensor technology, you could expect an extra one stop of high ISO performance, maybe a bit more.

However, surely they'd be going to 24 MP at least - which obviously reduces the advantage.

So although shallow DOFs with fast wide angle lenses would be nice, and I can see that if that's genuinely important enough to outweigh all the obvious disadvantages - weight, bulk, cost - then fair dos.

But otherwise I'm not seeing it - what am I missing here?

I use an Eye-Fi card. I hardly ever have to take the card out, so as well as avoiding the fiddly extraction for 99% of the time, it saves wear on the slidy card door.

It won't take you long

Since my software will have to work with Windows 8, even though it isn't a Metro app, I've been playing with it on and off since the early tech previews came out.

I don't like the Metro UI much, it seems quite clunky on a desktop. It's a shame, since it's quite nice on a phone or a tablet.

Did I say that (or even suggest it) anywhere?[/quote]Sorry if I've misunderstood - when you said to Algi that he was speaking from his experience not yours, it suggested to me that you had experience of action photography with the K-01.

So when you take the picture, is the image you get what was on the LCD at the time, or what was happening in real time.

You're clearly speaking from your own experience not mine.[/quote]So do you think that airshow photography with a K-01 at arms length and a 50-500 on the front would be practical?

Although I do think I know the answer, it's a genuine question - I can't imagine shooting aircraft with a K-01, especially if the LCD has the sun on it.

The 50-500 is heavy enough to hand hold at the best of times, let alone at arms length