I think it does not look much different to a normal full moon. I guess it might have been better closer to the horizon. There was a bit of thin cloud about and although if feels a bit soft here is my best attempt:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Moon%20shots/IMGP0263-c3_small.jpg[/IMG]

I prefer to shoot the moon when part of it is in shadow as you tend to get great crater details on the edge of the shadow.

Pentax K-7 with Sigma 135-400 @ 400mm
1/160sec, F16, ISO200, Spot metering with -0.3 ev
Cropped and resized.

Glyn

I think it takes a lot of courage to be the first submission. I love the glowing colour of the pipe in your shot and think you are definitely setting a challenge.

I like coming in early. Winning is nice but I'm here for the fun and the inspiration from seeing how everyone interprets these subjects. I think it would be very boring if nothing happened until the last few hours of the competition as well as giving the judge a hard time.

I believe getting in early also means that you don't have to worry so much about someone else having the same subject idea and getting in before you. The downside, as you say, is that later entrants know what they have to beat

Glyn

I'm in too .

No problems finding plastic here in Surrey although perhaps it would have been better to find something less frustrating to shoot. I keep forgetting how difficult is is to photograph reflective spherical objects .

Glyn

Addictive Plastic

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP0251-c2_small.jpg[/IMG]

Addictive and often very frustrating plastic in action.

K-7 with the Samsung equivalent of the DFA100 Macro
1/160sec, F8 & ISO400

Shot on 19/3/2011

Glyn

I guess SRS spotted the anomaly. The listing for the unboxed version appears to have been removed. (It is still on their ebay shop though where 2 are being listed for £499).

While I have a LBA demon in my head saying that I really should have this lens there is currently a stronger, calmer, voice that reminds me that over 5 years ago I bought a Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 which I still have but haven't used for ages. Not committing a spend on the 18-135mm lens also gets me around half way to owning a K-5 .

Glyn

edit - add comment about the ebay shop listing

I see that probably in response to other places dropping the price of the DA18-135 that SRS are now listing this lens for £489.

Slightly amusingly, on this page, adjacent to the above lens they are still listing the unboxed version, split away from K5 kits, for £499 .

It is slowly becoming tempting.

Glyn

I agree that a router reset is probably the first thing to try although in this case where malvern_man is getting to other sites without any delay this may not fix the problem. I think it is definitely worth a try though. Of course if he is on BT it will probably ruin his profile and may end up on reduced speeds for a few days. This is the main reason we moved off of BT onto BE* LLU were there is none of this stupid profiling.

One thing we sometimes see is a delay in the DNS lookup. This is the function that has to resolve the URL text to an actual IP address every time you access a page. On Firefox you see a message at the bottom saying something like "Looking up pentaxuser.co.uk". If you see this for an extended time (it should be almost instantaneous) then I think its likely you have DNS server problems. By default the router will be using the ISP's DNS server and it might be worth a try changing the router to use a different DNS server like the Google free one here.

I feel a bit uneasy using the free DNS servers. I've not tried Google but we had some problems with OpenDNS so if it makes no difference I would go back to the original settings to use the ISP's server. After all you are paying for this service and it ought to work.

Glyn

Many thanks Judith for another great, well thought out, subject that I think was quite challenge. Once again your reviews and judging are brilliant.

Congratulations to Geordie01 for the winning shot which I thought was fantastic. Congratulations also to the runners up and everyone else for meeting the challenge and producing a wonderful set of images.

I loved the way that many of the entries contained just a little bit of colour, possibly to prove that they were definitely not B&W .

Glyn

I can't say I have had any problems with Pentax User tonight but often is seems to slow down. Last night it ground to a halt early evening but only for a short while and all the other sites I use were fine.

I suspect that there are probably some bottle necks in the inter-exchange distribution possibly caused by the expansion of video and TV viewing across the net. Sunday evenings seem to be particularly bad. This might well be dependent on an individual's location.

We currently use BE unlimited, ADSL2+, LLU but on a long line (58db downstream) and are reliably getting 4.3Mb/s down & 1Mb/s up, about 4x better than we were getting with BT.

We still use BT for our phones and are on, what the guy who came to fix our non-ringing phones a couple of weeks ago described as, the most unreliable exchange in the country (Aldershot) . We don't get FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) until June. Then I'll be very tempted to migrate but probably not to BT as long as I can find someone else doing unlimited at a similar price to BT Infinity.

Glyn

I can't say I have had any problems with the space bar but it is early days as I have only had it for a few weeks. I bought it to replace a very clunky HP wireless keyboard where I was missing lots of key presses. I thought it was just me getting old but the new keyboard is fine .

Glyn