Believe me, we tried everything to get rid of this piano intact. Even when it was offered free comments included "It needs tuning" (which it would anyway after being moved). Gift horses and mouths sprung to mind!

In the end the wood was mostly burned and the metal frame dragged to the tip. Nowadays I'd weigh it in at a scrapyard as I've since twigged that said tip make a tidy profit from things people deliver to them! A very nice little arrangement, people bring you valuable stuff and you pretend you're doing them a favour by taking it off their hands!

Anything wooden which is no longer needed will be cut up and burned. Some packaging (flat pack furniture especially) tends to include scrap wood for spacing, we even broke up an old piano a while ago (after trying and failing to sell it or even give it away!)

We had a huge tree of unknown species until about ten years ago, when one morning after a stormy night the following conversation took place:

"Why's the trailer up in the air like that? And why is the chap from the house behind walking down the path? Hang on, the tree..."

It had uprooted itself and come to rest against the house behind, wrecking a chimney but thankfully not injuring anyone. The trailer was parked underneath it and the root ball had flipped it into the air when it lifted. A tree surgeon came and cut it up, which kept us in firewood for ages!

What Mike said!

The M42/screw mount lenses seem to attract the collectors as well as the users from what I see. I get the distinct impression that some bidders are after investments rather than gear to use carefully.

If I end up with something particularly rare or minty it just gets used more carefully. I won't take the near-perfect black ME into situations where it might get covered in muddy water, but I'll risk the scruffy chrome one (for example).

I think it's probably a case of more efficient coding. Also bear in mind that the PS disk needs to have help manuals in multiple languages and all the plugins you could ever possibly want, meanwhile GIMP can download extras for nothing.

I'm not sure if GIMP now has native RAW support or whether you still need the UFRaw plugin?

In my experience Pentax gear in good condition still fetches tidy prices, and they seem to be rising. In general you will do better on ebay if you split the lot up rather than selling as a bundle (lenses with cameras don't do as well as lenses alone).

As John said, consider listing it here too. You won't have any ebay sales fees to pay that way.

Ohh, is that where it comes from? I keep getting moaned at for not doing it!

My view: If you have to stuff a random object into the foreground to make the photo interesting then the subject is dull. That object is now the subject - it's gone from a landscape to a photo of your feet/friend/whatever with the landscape as a background. That's why if I want a sweeping panorama I use my 35mm lens and stitch images - you don't get as much dead space above or below the subject area that way.

Looking at the link it makes mention of some program to "handle installation", personally I'd get it from GIMP HQ here rather than a 3rd party site which wants you to use their installer. I wouldn't be surprised if said installer attempts to place spyware/adware and/or meddle with your settings, whereas if you go direct to the developers you'll get a clean installation with all the stuff you need.

I think I may have already tried something very similar a while ago. Wanting to photograph a large snow-covered tree in my garden with my then-new DA 35/2.4 I ended up taking four shots then stitching them together with Hugin.

It's the only image manipulation package I have (aside from an ancient copy of Corel Draw). I don't feel any urge to shell out for Photoshop.

To be honest I don't think GIMP is any harder to learn, assuming you're a newcomer to digital image editing. There are vast swathes of menus I've never used as I tend to simply clean marks from images and tweak brightness/levels for printing.