gah, i now crave a fast normal again.

thanks guys.

snappy, you have a pm.

personally, i think it's fine either way.

i think dng will be here to stay, since it's crossed that critical boundary that there'll always be a demand for dng capable editing programs.

with regards to pefs, it's easy enough to convert them. if you find that you come to a program that doesn't read your pefs anymore, just use your more recent program to convert them. job done.

if there are quality differences, i'm sure they would have been spotted in practice.

i shoot dng, but i'd happily change to pef. no biggie to me.

No zooms. All my equipment is in my signature. I like the limiteds very much. I don't even carry the 35mm much more, preferring to carry at 15mm in the pocket, with the 70mm on camera, or vice versa. Don't need a camera bag that way.

But I do miss the 30/1.4 I once owned, and the 85/1.4. I don't miss their weight, just the optical properties. I'm glad I made the trade-off, but it wasn't a complete no brainer.

The 200/2.8 doesn't get carried around so much. It's only for if I know I'll be doing some telephoto landscapes, or portraits that I want to nail.

Anyway, back to the 30/1.4, I agree that it's not for the test charts—every lens has some compromises. But the 30/1.4 puts its compromises exactly where I'd accept them. The test charts say things about soft edges at f/1.4, but they don't say anything about a smooth bokeh at f/1.4, which is a very rare trait.

I don't have photoshop, and am not tempted.

From my perspective, I really feel that the money is best left to other packages that get the job done faster, like Nik Software's stuff. I use a combination of LR3, Nik Software's Viveza, Photomatix, and Hugin. Although Photoshop would feel cleaner, in that all my editing would be in one place.

I haven't printed very large, so take my following recommendation with a pinch of salt. But I looked into a piece of software for myself, because I want to print large, and was very intrigued by Genuine Fractals (now renamed Perfect Resize in its latest incarnation link). It's expensive, but gets excellent reviews.

Another alternative is Alien Skin's blow up link, which looks similarly impressive, but it's just that I've seen more people rave about Genuine Fractals, so I was curious.

Have a look at a quick comparison at this dpreview thread link.

There might be other programs too, these are the only the ones I've heard of. I see this as a great area to expand in for an open source project.

i had it in a sony mount.

i rate it very highly too. excellent wide open in the centre, and excellent throughout at f/8.

that's what's important to me.

also the bokeh wide open is very smooth.

i think it's an underrated lens. it's just a bit too big for me. i am with pentax because i like small lenses.

yeah, meter off the palm then increase by a stop seems to be a common one.

never though of using this before. i don't know why.

spot meter off the back of your hand.

i read that tip yesterday, and thought it was quite good. you might need to memorise a bit of exposure comp, since we have varying shades of hands among us.

hope it's useful to at least someone. i found it worked.

yeah, they haven't got the best prices up there yet because they are still adding retailers to their lists. if you look at the kx and k7 listings, they are more comprehensive. the other listings will probably be reliable in about a month.

agreed. but sometimes a bargain comes along. i remember that i found out that jessops was selling some sony-zeiss glass at essentially half price, and you had to move quickly to get it because it was only up for one day, and this website helped me grab the deal.

i had a good copy of it too.

i reckon it received mixed reviews because of a) distortions, and b) softness wide open. these are common evils in designing ultra-wide angle lenses, especially for an slr (as opposed to a rangefinder).

BUT, you can work with them and get quality results.

a) stop down to about f/11.

b) post-process the distortions. use lr3, or ptlens.

the compositional difficulties were far greater for me than the technical ones.