I'd say it was probably impossible. The pollen is definitely out of focus with this one, but I don't think it looks bad at all.

Dan

I think we'd be hard pushed to say whether it was critically sharp at this size, but f/27 is a very small aperture and Mannesty's almost certainly right to suggest a wider one. Have a look at the MTF chart here: http://www.photozone.de/8Reviews/lenses/sigma_105_28/index.htm , you'll see the resolution of the lens is much poorer by f/22.

I find f/8 to be sharpest with my Sigma 105mm, but then depth of field is going to be a lot less than at f/27. Without knowing how large (or small) the flower is it would be hard to say whether DoF at the larger apertures would be too detrimental.

But it's a nice study, I like it.

Dan

I wonder if the way that a camera on a tripod mounted long lens vibrates differently to a handheld one. When it's on a tripod, you have a clear pivot which the whole thing will rotate around. Handheld you'd get more overall up/down, side to side shake.

Don't know if that would make a difference to SR, but it might. I'd be tempted to use a bean bag instead anyway.

Dan

40 entries so far and it's not midnight yet...

Glad it's not me judging this week!

Dan

You're welcome.

That was taken at the Natural History Museum last year, the reflection is in the pond in their wildlife garden at the side of the museum. I took several but this was the one that fitted best for this competition, I liked the contrast between the garden and the massive gothic building looming over it.

Well worth a visit if you have the chance, they have the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition on at the moment too (which is why I was there last year, just visiting unfortunately).

Dan

Confused me for a bit too.

Dan

Or you could read his problem again George.

When he uses the pics from his camera, not the Optio, the pics look fine on the 'frame', so it's not an issue with the frame. If he uses the card from his camera in his wife's Optio, the pics look naff on the frame, so it's not a card issue. Therefore it would seem to be a problem with either the camera, or the way the frame deals with the pics from the Optio.

As Don said, it may be that for some reason the frame is showing the a low res version of the image, perhaps from an embedded thumbnail. Or perhaps the way the image is resized for display is messing up the definition.

Try the Optio on a different sized image, ie. set it to 3Mp or something, lower than the hi-res 7Mp, and see how that looks, it might be that the pixel dimensions are more suited to the resizing than the &mp ones.

Dan

Oh, and well done again Lilly and all the great entries we had this week.

Dan

Well my old Samsung 17" CRT shows the noise nicely too.

When you calibrate, do you not have an option to set the brightness? With the Spyder, you have to make sure you can see a difference between the 4 darkest shades.

Checking with the colour picker in photoshop shows that the sky is definitely not black.




Dan

Hey! Just because it's gone midnight where you are!!

Dan