Funnily enough my wife runs a dance school and these were a sort of try out for a project in February, I'll be interested to klnow how you get on

Thanks for all the kind words and thanks for the recipe, Matt.
For the record, they were taken using the light coming in my living room window which is a very useful 180 degrees of curved glass ( those Victorians knew a thing or two) and a reflector. Set the DS on AV priority at f4 and ISO400. In PS added a few exra layers: 1. brightness +50, opacity 30, gaussian blur added; 2. Noise added, mono and opacity 30. The monochome ones were the same as above without the added noise and an another layer where the shadows were turned blue.

As Matt points out the noise has increased considerably when downsizing for the web. I quite like it but prints are much more subtle. I've noticed this with 'real grain' in B+W Pics on my web site which were shot on Tri-X at 1600ASA developed in Acuspeed, far far grainier looking than the film originals, Anyone got any opinions/ideas on this. I had really hoped that scanning (Minolta Dimage IV) would have produced one image that could be used across a variety of platforms.

Ken

Just some pics I did the other day with a light Cokin soft focus' plus a bit of noise and tweaking in PSE4. I'd appreciate your comments, good or bad!http://www.penciloflight.com/Carly/index.html

Ken

I've been using a 'shift' for the past 20 years it really is a remarkable lens, far sharper than any other 28mm Pentax lenses I've had - and they have all been excellent. The trouble is that since going digital there isn't really much call for a shifting standard lens

Tweaking converging verticals isn't exactly the same and I believe some bodies such as English Heritage will accept pics where the perspective has been controlled in lens but not when it has been photoshopped

The f2/35 has a dedicated hood which is the clip on type, I'm sure I've seen them on ebay from time to time. The f2 is rarer than the f3.5 so I think Mac is right about rarity though.

All my SMC Takumars came with hoods just labeled 'Takumar'.

I've always preferred incandescent lights to flash - no recycle time and mush easier to control and see what you are doing. Recently I've been using Kinoflo http://www.kinoflo.com/Lighting%20Fixtures/Diva-Lite/Diva-Lite.htm Which have banks of flourescent tubes and come in a variety of sizes from small enough to attach to a car sun visor and power from the cig lighter socket right up to truly huge ones. Big advantage is that they come with two sets of tubes, daylight and tungsten, although I find daylight a bit cool and tungsten a bit warm. This is easily solved by using 3 daylight tubes and 1 tungsten or vice versa. They are very light and have barn doors although there can be but of light spillage if you are working in a confined space. They are inexpensive to hire from Lee Lighting if you are lucky enough to live near one of their branches.

Hi Liam,

Sorry to put you to so much bother, what a pain computers are when they go down. I thought I was having some local problems but have now discovered that I had run out of my allotted space on my ISP's server, I only had 2mb so I have now upgraded to 1gb - that I hope should be enough but it was a surprise to find that I had 11gb of pics on my laptop!

Anyway thanks once again for your help, it'll take a day or so to get set up on the new server.

Ken

Thanks to all of you for your sound advice all of which has been taken on board. Daniel, that is an excellent point about inserting capital letters and, Gwynn, I've downloaded Jalbum. Liam this seems an incredibly generous offer, are you sure???

Ken

I'm just about to go online with my new revamped web site. I'm using Dreamweaver but although I grasp the rudiments of hand coding i'm far from being competent. I'd like to use the templates in PSE4 but I really dont like any of them very much. I want something restrained and clean looking. Do any of you know of any templates to buy or even better download free that might fit the minimalist look of www.penciloflight.com?

All input appreciated and large malts for every contributor in our virtual bar.

Ken

I would bracket exposures. I think generally with a diffuser you might want a higher key image so overexposing by a stop might get you into the right area but a lot will depend on the subject matter.