And Van Goch Sunflowers. You have a winner(s) here.

Can you reload the firmware?

When you set out to look it is amazing how you can make really satisfying pictures - like these.

The first is as described while the second is indeed with a simple macro lens. The second one is all in one focal plane (looking straight down on it) but there is considerable depth to the first one together with a horrendous natural lighting problem necessitating complete shading from the left side and blocking any light entering between the vertebrae from behind. I don't use flash as I simply can't understand it! My solution is to light the bits you want and then combine them. Additional depth can be added as needed by further stacking but f22 was enough here.

As opposed to 'still life'. Odd title - well, none of it is still alive and one of it has a bad reputation.

The dead spider is a false widow - not as bad as its real counterpart but they can still give you a nasty bite. It is sitting in front of a long dead collection of vertebrae from some small mammal that I found under a hedge.



It was photographed with an 'A' series 28mm lens that had been reversed onto a K1. The image is a stack of four, processed through Combine ZP, not so much for depth of field - (f22 did quite a good job there) - but to improve the lighting. The end of the lens was about 2inches away from the spider. It was focused by moving the sheet of paper on which the arrangement rested while the camera remained static on a tripod. Live view and mirror-up remote release did the rest. These were 8 second exposures.

And here is a very much alive one that I rescued from the bath a while ago. I simply grab house spiders but not these perishers!



All comments, favourable or otherwise are welcome!

It's old, old, old but they give wonderful results .....
SMC Pentax-FA 1:4.5-5.6 80-320mm
Inexpensive and they appear quite often. Normally silver bodies but they do come in black too.

Otherwise, for a K3, K3ii the PLM 55-300 is just made for the job!

Nobody has mentioned Faststone Image Viewer (forget the final word) which is a free, simple and powerful editor (and viewer). I can't even understand Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity and gave up on them years ago - they are even more incomprehensible now. I get perfectly good results from Faststone.

Well I tried to make it inclusive .... ?

On the left is a bog standard Pentax-A zoom 28-80mm such as was found on thousands of P30 cameras back in the day. It's OK but that's about it.

On the right is an SMC Pentax-A zoom 28-80mm. Seen alone one can easily confuse the two. Seen together they are clearly different - and so are the results you get from it. It is vanishingly rare as not many were made and people hang on to them.




You do see lots of ads on Ebay stating "SMC" in front of the engraved name since it is what usually does appear there but a look at their photographs instantly show that they are the common version, so do look first !

And another PM