Another vote for Photomatix.

Regards
David

I'VE ONLY EVER OWNED ONE PENTAX DSLR (K-x) AND I'VE NOT HAD ANY PROBLEMS. MY SON HAS A USED K-m AND HAS NOT HAD ANY PROBLEMS. IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING WHY I AM SHOUTING - I AM TRYING TO GET A POSITIVE MESSAGE ACROSS AS I THINK PENTAX GEAR IS BRILLIANT!!!!!

Apologies to those of you who've had problems, but I suspect most have been more than pleased. On a somewhat related point, I own a Saab 9-3 (silly beggar I hear you cry) and when I first purchased this car I was almost swept away by the tide of negativity on forums. Suffice to say the car is fantastic and has now covered over 100,000 miles with barely a sweat broken.

Best wishes, David

You can buy the Chinese made Lens Hoods for the DA L 18-55 and DA L 55-300mm with confidence from ebay (flower petal type for the 18-55mm and the normal hood for the 55-300). The quality is excellent and they fit perfectly with no vignetting. Best thing is they are less than £2 each.

Regards
David

The first Mushroom shot in particular is great and the others are very good, notwithstanding the plants sprouting out of the mushroom! I would love to see you posting some shots of varied subjects - I think that all that is lacking is a little confidence in your own ability.

Regards
David

Steve, number 1 is is very good, definitely the best of the bunch and that lens looks like it is a peach! I like using my SMC Takumar 135 F3.5 for close-ups, but this requires a full set of tubes and becomes a bit cumbersome. Well done on both your purchase and your pictures.

Regards
David

Lots of suggestions here already, so you may not need any more, but I have noticed that you use narrow Depth of Field with great skill in your macros. Why not develop that theme and use your DOF skills to photograph subjects other than Macro with a narrow DOF? This could be anything, even buildings and landscapes to an extent. I know you have a good few older lenses and these tend to produce lovely out of focus effects.

Regards
David

Thanks Andrew, let me know if there's any progress and I will also try again and let you know.

Regards
David

Now that the new PPG website is finally up, I've signed up and attempted to load some images. However, every time I try I get the message 'Could not add this photo to the Gallery', despite every picture meeting all criteria for size, jpg format etc. Has anyone else experienced this with the new PPG and can anyone advise me on what may be going wrong? I am tearing my hair out with it.

PC system is Windows XP, running IE8.

Thanks in advance of any help you can give.

Can't you just remove the focussing screen and blow it out with the rocket blower? I don't have a K-5 but I would have thought you could do this?

Regards
David

I have a Teleplus 7-element 2x converter, supposedly fairly good optical quality, but the performance varies wildly depending on the lens I partner it with.

- With Sigma 50mm f2.8 macro, shots are still sharp, IQ suffers only a little

- With DA L 55-300mm forget it - shots are blurred and rubbish

- With SMC Takumar 135mm f3.5 (very sharp lens) it's somewhere between the two

I'm less concerned about the loss of two stops have good eyesight and the ISO can be whacked up (depends on camera of course, K-x is very good at high ISO). All in all, I use the 2x converter only rarely as I don't like the loss in image quality.

Regards
David