Yes, I think I remember that - I used it with my Tamron 500mm mirror but I'd never looked at the zoom, now I look it doesn't seem to support that. Looks like there was a good reason for keeping all my old manual PK lenses after all!

Thanks Peter - I saw your second post, edited mine to add about the Sigma lens, but didn't see your edit. I had never thought of turning off shake reduction, but will try that next time.

Simon, thanks for the note about AF - I think that's probably what I meant about the equipment not being up to it. I'm not sure my eyesight is up to the idea of using manual focus, but maybe the catch-in-focus feature will help me out.

In any case it seems that dispense with shake reduction and do a lot more practising is the way forward, along with accepting that I'll have a lot of deleting to do.

Cheers all.

Thanks for those thoughts - if nothing else it's good to know that it isn't just me that (should be) binning a fair number of shots.

Peter, that shot is what I was trying to achieve - pin sharp vehicle and blurred background. Even my good shots are good when cropped, dropped to 800 pixels and run through the unsharp mask in PS, I'm not sure they'd stand up to scrutiny if posted full-size. Though there will be some improvement on that score with your higher-resolution camera.

There is a chance that the cars are at different speeds, what I really should have done was post a second shot of the same car - again, no telling whether it was going slower for one lap than the other, but of six or seven shots of the Firenza, one worked and the rest are just like the Capri shot below. I was trying to pan with the car, a short distance before, then take the shot, then carry on. Trouble is, take 200-odd shots across two races and it all starts to get a bit hazy as to what I tried.

They are both quite cropped, though could have been more so - I was using the 70-300 to get some distance freeze-frame shots as they came around the bend, but then at other times using the shortest focal length to get the pan shots, and 70mm is a little too close. I was having the same trouble at Oulton last year using the 50-500 from a bit further away. I don't do this very often (mostly static car show shots) so perhaps it is practice.

There will be some shake Mike - this was Donington last weekend, and although it was blue sky a lot of the time, it did go very cold at one point and I was having shake trouble for the later race due to freezing cold rain. I've got a couple where one car is overtaking another and I've managed to get the one in the background pin-sharp but the one you can see all of is blurred, not what I intended at all.

Good to know it's not really the equipment though - at least that means it's worth carrying on trying to get the technique right.

I wondered about the lens because it's a cheapo zoom really, but then the Sigma isn't cheap (to me at least) and I still had similar trouble. It's the old Sigma, though, without built-in stability control.

I always used to try to get the fastest possible shutter speed to freeze the action, but frozen shots don't look as good (IMO) as these panned ones unless you catch a roll or something special, and I'm always looking the wrong way for those. I will practice some more in the summer.

I'm trying to take pan shots at motorsport events, using a slower shutter speed and panning the camera to blur the background. In many cases this works quite nicely:

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/Donington%20March%2022nd%202014/IMGP0706a.jpg[/IMG]

But by far the majority of the time, I get this:

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/Donington%20March%2022nd%202014/IMGP0692c.jpg[/IMG]

Literally the majority of shots I took last weekend are like the above, and I'm looking for advice on what the issue might be. I'm trying to decide between:

Expecting too much from a Kx and Tamron 70-300 lens
Focus position is wrong
General technique is wrong
Shutter speed too slow, just good luck that some work
Or anything else.

As I recall I started out at 1/100, increased to 1/125, and then to 1/160. Much faster than that and the background starts to get sharper and the effect is lost. I didn't get noticeably better shots on 1/160 than I did on 1/100.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

One enlarger I used in the past allowed you to turn the head around, so that instead of shining the image onto the base of the enlarger, you could bring it to the edge of the bench and shine onto the floor for extra magnification.

I've got an enlarger, but I'm up in Cheshire. I bought it from a shop that was closing down (actually, a mate got it for me) and I've never used it other than to switch it on. Wouldn't want much for it, but shipping might be an issue unless it comes to pieces in a good way.

How does it compare to the Pentax 18-mm DAL kit lens like the one that came with my Kx? I've been seeing what might be some picture quality issues, and I wondered if the kit lens just wasn't up to much.

Thanks for the views. I *think* I will carry on looking at used K5 bodies for the moment.

As a Kx user currently considering a used K5, would it be fair to say then that a K30 might be a better bet, or am I still going to get a better camera with a K5? In terms of resolution of course they're the same as each other, but I hear a lot about how great the K5 is but not so much about the K30, and I saw another post recently where someone described the 'desirability order' as K3 / K5 / K30 which implied that an old K5 is still better than a new K30.

Apologies for hijacking the thread. My usage is general with some motorsport / air show stuff, though I'm always looking for other things to shoot.

What's the picture count?

I'm looking for a K5, seem to be quite a few around so just trying to get a low count now. I guess they're all going to be outside any kind of warranty. Kicking myself I missed the very low count one last week.