A very warm welcome - you will not be disappointed with the K-5 and you'll find a wealth of useful information on the Forum.

Regards
David

I would go with John's suggestion. Get a decent tripod and bracket manually between shots. It's by far the easiest method.

Regards
David

I'm a little confused. I have a K-5 Mk1 and a K-5iis and I've never noticed any metering issues with either modern AF lenses or the old manual ones. I've used both bodies extensively with old manual lenses. What do you mean by 'crap Pentax metering'?

Regards
David

Sorry for the late reply Alistair, been out all evening. Contrast was tweaked only very slightly, blacks have not been increased. I spent approx. 1 minute on the image, basically adjusted yellow saturation, added shadow detail to the grass in the foreground, reduced the brightness of the foreground grass by burning the midtones a bit, did a bit of lightening on the grassy hill in the top left, added a little dodging and burning to selected areas, increased global levels, applied global sharpening and reduced global colour saturation.

As detailed above, sharpening was global and not too heavy. Used Photoshop Unsharp Mask, 50%, Threshold 4 and 2.0 Pixels.

Regards
David

How about this one Alistair? Hope you don't mind but I've had a little play with it and this is my take on the scene.




Best wishes
David

That one's better Alistair; the yellow hue has almost gone. If you can tone down the vibrancy of the greens it will be just about perfect.

Regards
David

I wondered how long it would take before someone wrote that! These are lovely images Alan, at this distance away there must be just a Hare's breadth between success and failure

Sorry about that, but it wasn't as bad as Algi's

Cheers
David

I think this image is much, much nicer than the first one in the other post. It's a lovely composition and nice light, BUT I think the processing is still letting it down. As others have mentioned, there is a pronounced yellow tone across the whole image. I've used Photomatix on many occasions and it has never created a yellow hue like this.

It might we worth checking the colour space settings on your camera and all your processing software, make sure it's 'SRGB' all the way through the chain.

I'm not sure what processing packages you have (except lightroom), but none of the ones I've used produce yellow colour casts. White balance on the camera would be the next thing to check, failing this, the only other thing I can think is that it has been warmed up deliberately? One thing I always try to do with landscapes is to ensure that the grass looks a natural green; this usually involves lowering the yellow saturation by anything between 10 and 20%. The image could also stand quite a large hike in the levels, I would guess the Histogram on this one is balanced to the left and even the sky's highlights are not close to the tipping point in terms of their brightest areas.

It be nice to know what camera settings were used, i.e. aperture and shutter speed. The image is a little 'soft' in the foreground, although the background detail looks sharper. I know you've asked about other lens alternatives for landscapes in the past and it may be worth having a go with a cheaper old manual focus lens, something like a Pentax-M 28mm F3.5 which should produce sharper images.

I hope you don't think I'm being over critical, I'm just trying to offer some useful suggestions. You clearly have an 'eye' for landscapes, but other elements are holding you back at present; once you find the 'right' way for you I think your images will fly.

Regards
David

Does it really matter? I would guess it's pretty sharp at most apertures and I doubt that images would look soft even at F1.4.

Regards
David

A big improvement Shaun it would be good to see what can be done with the original unprocessed files as I think there's an excellent image waiting to be revealed!

Regards
David