Then, for you, it's a good picture. The qualification is that you have an opinion, don't be afraid, or reluctant, to voice it.

The photo reminds me of the sort of shot you'd see in a arty road trip book, and I like it for that. Darkmunk's right about the jpeg artifacts, re-save it at a higher jpeg quality setting and see how it looks. If you can do something to tone down the white building top-right, that would improve it for me too.

Dan

Aiki, also note from Hefty's examples how much easier it is to 'select' a background for the shot with the 100mm lens. The 35mm shows more of the background, as it has the wider field of view, and it can be harder isolate your subject against a clean background. With a longer focal length a small movement side to side or up and down can dramatically change the background.

If Hefty had moved his camera down a bit so that he was looking up slightly towards the flower, the 100mm shot would have had a green background, giving the photo a different look altogether. This is harder to do with a 35mm macro.

Hope that makes sense.

Dan

Casper does essentially the same as Norton's Ghost, but in a cheaper, easier way, hence Casper, the friendly ghost.

Dan

When you say 13,742 files Ken, do you mean image files? It seems like an attractive proposition, but I have over 200Gb of images, and that would take forever to upload.

I use external hard drives (one onsite that gets backed up every day, one offsite that I do every fortnight) and use a program called Casper which I've had for a couple of years now, very simple to use, does what I want. Think it was about $35, which I considered fair for the peace of mind it gave me. I see it's now $50.

It does incremental back-ups, just adding or replacing files as necessary, and will also clone drives, which was handy when I recently upgraded all of my drives, including the Windows partition. I just installed the new drive, used Casper to partition it up, clone everything, then took the old drive out and everything worked exactly as before.

Dan

Interesting post Lance, I too have the DA*300mm and Tamron 1.4x converter, and find that my K10D can hunt about with that combo. Nice to know that the K-7 is better in this respect too.

Like I need another reason to buy one.

Dan

They would be manual focus and exposure only, and you'd need lenses with aperture rings if you wanted to have any control of the aperture. So that would rule out your 60-250 for a start.

Dan

EDIT: Added Lemmy's quote for context.

I'm Daniel Bridge and I've been here since March 2006. I'm a semi-professional nature photographer, working with Wildlife Trusts, running workshops, offering tuition and selling prints. I also work part time as an Assistant Visitor Centre Manager for Essex Wildlife Trust.

I've been taking photos since my early teens, got my first SLR in 1996, my first Pentax (MZ-5n) in 2003, then an *istD in 2005. My signature below shows my current camera.

Particular interests for me are close-up and macro, flowers, foliage, trees, landscapes, that sort of thing really. Oh, and playing bass guitar.

The Pentax User forum has me well and truly hooked (my wife can attest to that), and it's a great place to share knowledge, ask questions or just have a chat with like-minded people.

It's wonderful to be part of the Pentax User team, and be able to give something back to the forum that welcomed me back in 2006.

Well, thank you for the good wishes (I deleted all the bad ones ), it's nice to be able to take some of the load off John and Matt, although I'm certain I'll be asking them lots of questions in the coming weeks/months, as they have done a superb job of moderating in the time I've been here and will be the very best teachers I could have.

Obviously many of you know me to some extent already, but tomorrow I'll put a bit of blurb in the 'Welcome from the Moderator Team' thread for those that don't know me so well.

Cheers!
Dan

I'm guessing because all the other modes require a setting on the camera to be changed, whereas the cable probably just trips the same circuit as the shutter button, so can be used in any mode/configuration.

Dan

There was also this thread, which was sort of along similar lines but from perhaps more of a technical point of view, and was once a sticky. Still applicable as far as I'm concerned.

Dan