If you have a lithium ion battery that has been part used (but you don't know HOW part used) what happens when you put it in the charger?
The 'old fashioned' way was for the charger to fully discharge it and then start from scratch -my old Fujifilm camera even has the facility to fully discharge batteries in the camera and this is recommended prior to re charging its AA batteries. If I'm intending to take a spare battery out with me I always stick it on charge as a matter of principle (having discovered once that I had one that had gone flat since charging it some time prior) but I've no idea if this is likely to harm it.

I have a wonderful acer tree and it is just beginning to turn. These two leaves were lying on the ground and I was struck by their contrasting colours so I rescued them and tried to show them off.

With a ring flash on low power



two versions of backlighting






and with a ringflash to show how the leaves were suspended by a black cotton thread and prevented from
spinning by a control thread to one side. This one is also interesting in that it clearly shows the yellow leaf in front of the red one
despite whatever the backlit ones are trying to imply!



K5, Pentax SMC M 100mm macro.
All comments are welcome

Beautiful place, beautiful photos. It's incredibly easy to get quite lost on the Long Mynd - I did once.

No - all the verticals ARE vertical. Super clarity in this shot

You want to see some really messed up EXIFs? Have a look at mine - they are on another planet

The lady with the eyelashes is excellent

These foggy days at least have the benefit of producing wonderful effects with water droplets on spider webs. Michaelblue's earlier posting, taken with a Tamron macro prompted me to search out a few subjects and have a go as well ....

1
This has already appeared on the main gallery



2
here is another version that has been doctored somewhat



3
The background colours were achieved by a highly technical process ....



4
.... of draping a coloured towel over the fence behind the web. f5.6 kept it well out of focus.
You can see it quite clearly in each droplet now you know what you are looking for.



5
and a closer version



6
with a different towel, showing what happens when you clumsily knock the web. The drops fall off !



All taken with a K5 and a Pentax f4 100mm SMC macro lens, almost wide open and ISO 100
Camera on a tripod, focused via Live View, hang the lens cap over the eyepiece to shut out stray light and release by remote cable.

Gorgeous results - well done

I looked at Zerene Stacker but it seems to be aimed at professionals who have built all manner of technological goodies using hard drive stepper motors and the like that advance each frame by fragments of a millimetre. Such jobs have to be left running all night. These pictures demonstrate that wonderful results can be had from just few carefully planned frames and the use of a great piece of freeware. Yes, you do have to allow an amount of space around each image for cropping out the processing artefacts but once you realise this and take account of it, Roger's images clearly show what you can expect.

Super result - and all without any sort of fancy, expensive equipment