Many thanks and apologies from me for stirring it. At the time I felt you were saying that the subject needed to be shown in the best circumstances and I knew that my submission was taken on a fairly grey day in a difficult setting.

I was trying to achieve a feel that the subject was in a public space and in a context to its subject. The trouble was that I had forgotten what a tight space it was in.

Glyn

At the time Darkmunk originality posted his comment the only submitted entry was mine. So I assumed that he was having a go at me.

I have a thick skin but it certainly hurt at the time.

I found the bargeman was a very difficult subject. It is in a tight space surrounded by high walls, buildings, street architecture and some junk. I knew it never was going to be perfect but I did put quite a bit of effort into achieving what I considered to be the best approach. I thought Hyram's review comments were excellent and very appropriate.

Ok, I could have chosen something else and did have a go at the sculpture of Alice, her sister, and the rabbit, also in Guildford, but on review I felt the bargeman was better.


From my direction I do not think the 2-week competition is working in the way it was originally intended. My take on the original rules was that it was going to be mainly a review by members of the group with the judging just being a summing-up exercise. Now it seems that it is just a longer version of the one-week competition.

I have always felt I'm at the cannon fodder end for entries in these competitions and now think I need to recuperate so will not be entering the current round.


Glyn

Many thanks for your comments.

On the day you set this competition my wife was holding a meeting for one of her local groups so I needed to escape. This sculpture came to mind and it was only a short train journey.

As you suggest it was a difficult subject to photograph, particularly as I wanted to get some of the river into the frame. I took shots of it from lots of angles and you can see a selection here.

An upside of the day was that I found a 2nd hand DA18-250mm in the Guildford branch of LCE so not all was lost

Well done everyone,

Glyn

Bargeman Sculpture

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP3025-c1_small.jpg[/IMG]

I would like to kick off this competition with a sculpture of a bargeman on the Town Wharf in Guildford.

I have tried to include some of the river for context but in a tight space its difficult to avoid interference from buildings and other street architecture and even with this shot I have had to clone out a lamp-post

K20D with DA*16-50 @ 36mm
F11, 1/60sec and ISO 200
Taken at 10.36 on 14/05/2009

Glyn

I have the Sigma 600mm mirror lens and that fits fine as do both versions of the Tamron 500mm (55B & 55BB) and the Tamron 350mm (06B).

While not really an issue for long lenses, including mirrors, I think its worth pointing out that any large diameter lens may produce a shadow when using the on-board flash. I have found this particularly with the Sigma 10-20 and even the Pentax DA*16-50. This is cured by using a separate flash unit, fitted to the camera or stand-alone.

Glyn

In the playback menu under Instant review tick/untick Bright/Dark area.

Glyn

Appolagies, I've been busy today and only just had a chance to catch up with this thread.

I live close to Aldershot which is a garrison town. Because of this we benefit from some interesting features. For example it is quite normal to come across a tracked armoured personal carrier with L plates on our local roads. Another feature, as Mike has indicated, is that there are large areas of "protected" landscape given over to army training. The picture is from the edge of some live firing ranges close to where I live in Ash Vale Surrey. There are two levels of these ranges. There is a boundary area which is open to the public. Further in there is a danger area where live firing takes place. This inner area is fenced off and live firing is indicated by the presence of red warning flags. However if the flags are not flying then the public is allowed to enter the area. Here this only happens a couple of times a year, in August and at Christmas. The outer areas are open all the time and are mainly conifer woodland which gets used for non-firing training. It is not unusual to come across groups of troops when exploring this woodland.

The Ash ranges are used for small-arms training although the by-law that defines its use also indicates that it can also be used for anti-tank weaponry training but I have no experience of that actually happening here.

My picture shows the signs at an entrance to the outer area. No live firing takes place in these areas but I suspect this a standard set of signs put up by the MOD.

We have to put up with the sound of live firing but otherwise it is a real privilege to have access to these areas. The inner area is protected heath-land and is the habitat for a wide range of wild life.

Here is an example picture of the flag & signs at the boundary to the live firing areas:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP2763-c1-small.jpg[/IMG]


And this is what the inner heath-land looks like, taken from outside the wire!

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP2744-small.jpg[/IMG]


I hope this makes sense,

Glyn

I spent a few hours in our local woods this morning to see if I could come up with something original for the competition. It was a lovely warm spring day and I took over 130 shots.

I was tempted to put up the following but in the end decided to go for something a little more traditional

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP2654-c1-small.jpg[/IMG]

Glyn

I recently bought a Plustek scanner and I also have an old Umax flatbed scanner which has an illuminated lid for transparency scanning which I have used for the odd slide before the Plustek (but is limited to 1200dpi max).

I bought the Plustek because we have a 35mm slide collection that dates from about 30 years ago that I'm keen to digitise. I did a little research and decided that I would go with a dedicated slide scanner.

From my direction the most desirable was the Braun Multimag Slidescan 4000 as this can take a 100 slot circular slide holder which suggests that it would be good for batch scanning. However it has a price tag of around £900 which ruled it out for me.

There is a whole range of plustek scanners. I went for the 7500i SE which I got on an offer from picstop.co.uk before the recent price increases.

I went for the i version because our slide collection has spent the last 30 years either in lofts or under beds and is suffering from dust contamination. I was therefore keen to have the infra-red dust removal functionality.

The Plustek has a manually advanced slide holder that holds 4 slides. I bought a 2nd holder so that I could load the next set while scanning the first set.

It came with Siverfast SEplus software. A lot of reviewers appear to have trouble with this software and recommend VueScan. So far I have had no serious problems wih the Silverfast software. If you decide to go this way and not use the Siverfast software then its cheaper to buy a Plustek SE rather than the more expensive AI version.

So far I have scanned about 100 slides(with around another 500 to do ). The Plustek has lots of options and its difficult to work out which combinations are best. I'm mainly doing a two pass scan, with auto histogram adjustments, and a third infared dust removal pass. I'm also scanning at 5000 dpi as this seams to give a near equivalent to 10m pixels. This seems to work fairly well but each slide appears to need individual tweaks to get the best result.

Scanning at 5000dpi creates rather large temporary files although the final jpegs are similar in size to "best" on the K20D. At this resolution it is also very slow, taking over 5 minutes for each slide. So I tend to do my slide scanning in the background while doing other things on the PC.

The dust removal sometimes produces some strange results and its advisable to clean each slide before scanning to minimaise the dust removal processing. I have bought a dedicated brush for this. For some slides I have had to turn off the dust removal and do a post scan manual clean-up up in photoshop.

A few times I have had some sort of registration misalignment between the multiple passes of the scanner but they come good on a 2nd attempt.

I found this link Scanning Tips very helpful.

I hope this helps,

Glyn

I'm not completely happy with it but here is the best shot I have managed to achieve this fortnight:

Blackbird in the Grass

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Garden%20Birds/IMGP2176-c2-small.jpg[/IMG]

K20D with DA55-300 @ 210mm
F8, 1/30sec & ISO 400 handheld!


Taken at 16:48 on 31/03/2009

Glyn