I've got an old milk bottle with a thick glass-end. You could super-glue
a Pentax mount on to it, and use it with a double-glazed kitchen window
mounted on a reversing ring ? Sell you the complete kit for £1500.00.

Thanks 'johnriley', you said in a few words what I was trying to say with lots.

Nice to have that manual 'over-ride' now and again in this 'automatic' age.

The first Pentax camera I bought, was a ME, not the ME Super. I was new to
photography, but that is another story, I got round some of the limitations
of the ME, it was semi-automatic, Av adjustable, Tv not adjustable, by
using the exposure compensation dial. Would that not satisfy your needs ?
The ME went from 4x to 1/4 x exposure compensation.
Just shoot using the exposure compensation, and develop to suit the speed you need ?

Looked out my original ME to check I was not talking kack, can't believe it , but the ISO
settings went down to "12" , cool eh ? Never shot less than Ilford Pan F @ 50, some of
the old "Dude's" on this forum will remember Pan F. I loved it.

Thanks guy's, I see it can be done.

I'm no Photoshop expert, and I don't use all the facilities available.
I just tried removing the colour and increased the contrast a little, this
made the freckels go a bit dark, poor Katie looked like the pock-marked kid.

We all have our comfort zones and to venture out to other area's sometimes takes a bit of a push.
Thanks Don and John, I'll venture a few steps further.

I did have a go with Adobe Lightroom when it was in Beta, and I quite liked it,
I'm going to have a go with Aperture, ( the trial version ), have you tried both Don ?
Do you prefer Aperture ? I would like to stick with Apple software if it does the job.

I'm using Elements-3 and Photoshop-7 on my iMac G-5.

It was last week, at my son's 18th birthday party that the photo's were taken, this
was Katie's favourite,




but I had a wee bit of a play with some of the pictures in Photoshop, and
this is the one everybody wants a copy of, ( my son is the tall one ), more
a graphic than a photo I know.




(To George -- reducing the size of the picture for the web, seems to
increased the perception of sharpening - certainly on my screen)

Thanks George, I understand your points. I had other 'better' pics of Katie, I just used
this one for my black and white question, as it was 'as-shot'.

Don, Katie loves you !!! She hates her freckels and you made them disappear !
When I tried the b&w conversion if I lost the freckels, her hair went funny, as it's
nearly the same colour as the freckels, and then the whole picture seemed false.

You have managed to keep the eyes and hair looking 'real' which keeps the face
looking 'real'.

You couldn't do me a step by step guide, on how you did it ?

i.e. did you select different parts of the pic for adjustment ?

I recently took a few pictures at a family party. The picture below is one of a
series I took of my daughter Katie. I tried to convert it to black and white,
but her freckels turned quite black in the process and the end result was
not as I, or Katie would have wished.




Anyone tried black and white with 'red-heads'

The full size pic is here if you want to have a go, it also shows how sharp my new Sigma 105 macro is !!!

http://idisk.mac.com/john_md-Public/Katie-1.jpg

It's about 3.3 MB and you will want to squeeze those black-heads.

Eh . . . . DS ?

To change the subject, and ask for a little help and advice, consider this
picture, and I'll start a new thread "Red Heads" under 'General Chat' ok people ?

Eh . . no edit's

Just a nice sunny near the Solway Firth.

They say the attention span of the average 'net' user is
7 seconds, so if your site don't load in less than that,


bye bye !!!!

Hopefully, my boat pic will load in less than that,








DS with 105mm Sigma, 1/3000 F3.5 ISO200