It depends on the image Drew, I use different methods for different shots. Easiest way is to show you sometime when you have a minute?

Regards
David

I would recommend a Hitech set of 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 ND Grads. Depending on your lenses, 85mm ones may be OK, but if you have some lenses that are prone to vignetting (dark halo around the edge with some filters) you may need 100mm ones. If you can get away with 85mm (I find these fine) you can buy a cheap Cokin A type filter holder with a large selection of rings from ebay for about a tenner. All in, the kit will cost you about £65, money well spent.

Regards
David

Congratulations Alistair, great news!

Regards
David

Hi Stefano, great to see another member from outside the UK. You are not old fashioned if you use old lenses, there are a lot of us who prefer to shoot with these in certain situations (myself included).

The new lenses are great too

Regards
David

The second one is miles better even on the small image size of the Forum. If you shoot in jpeg the camera sharpens the image anyway, if you shoot in RAW you need to do post process sharpening to get the best from the image, especially if printing, but even with web sizes it is noticeable.

I sharpen all my images a small amount, less so on the K-5iis than on the K-5.

Regards
David

It's not speculation Nigel. The movement causes light to spill onto adjacent pixels on the sensor, hence blur is introduced. It will be very slight I would expect but it will be blur nonetheless. There is always a 'price to pay'.

Regards
David

If the sensor is moving it will add to blur.

It might be slight but it will be there; if it didn't do this it wouldn't prevent moire.

Regards
David

My recommendation would be no good for the image above, but might help in the future. Use good filters (ND Grad may have helped) and under-expose so that there are no burned out highlights. The dynamic range and lack of noise in shadow areas with the K-5 will allow you to pull the detail out of the shadows in post process. You can never recover burned out highlights like the ones in this image.

I don't think there's any need for HDR with the K-5 as it has enough dynamic range to balance the image, with a little help from the right filters.

This one is an example which was shot with a polariser (Hoya Pro1) but without a ND Grad. It was exposed as far to the right as possible without burning out the sky. If I had used the ND Grad it would have been better balanced, but I didn't have it to hand at the time. It was shot with the K-5iis and DA17-70; the shadows could be brightened a lot more but I've chosen to keep it this way as I like the atmosphere:




Hope this is of some help.

Regards
David

Final comment of the night before I go to bed - I think the 'on or off' AA filter will be the killer feature of this camera that will grab most headlines. If it works well, it will kill the debate about whether AA or non AA is preferable.

Look at the reviews and previews already out there on the web - they are all focussing on this feature more than anything else. I suspect also that this has so much mileage in it for future firmware upgrades - the possibilities are fascinating.

Regards
David

The specs mean very little on any camera if the sensor implementation, processor, imaging software etc. don't cut it. I am reserving my final judgement on the K-3 until we've seen some proper reviews, but I fully expect it to out-perform the K-5 quite comfortably. If it does, that will be good enough for me. I don't expect it will compete with a D800E, nor should it. We all need / want different things from our cameras, personally I'm happy with APS-C at the moment, but I fully understand why others aren't and need / want FF.

Whatever, there's no need for anyone to slag anyone else off if they want to go FF, and no need to slag anyone off if they don't!

We all have different opinions, some of us use more moderate / less provocative language than others to express those opinions

Regards
David