The strange luminous trees are Silver Birches, so they may well look brighter than a blue sky. Personally I think the image is quite decent.

The point of HDR is to bring out detail in the highlights and shadows, not necessarily to make it exactly as it is which can give rise to pictures that are nothing but soot and whitewash! With digital one cannot compensate by using a softer grade paper or fiddling with exposure and development times to compensate.

John

Weird!

There's a buy it now on ebay presently:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Centon-MR20-Macro-Ring-Flash-gun-works-canon-nikon-min...#vi-content

I cannot vouch for the seller personally but flash looks OK, it is boxed and reasonably priced.

There are some others which are dearer but don't appear to be boxed.

If you do buy it ask the seller why he didn't keyword spam Pentax too!

John K

They're quite good, fairly light, use a couple of AA's and low trigger voltage.

There's several other brands sharing the same design which includes the Starblitz 1000 and the Vivitar 5000.

John K

A quick Google search found this Word document from libraryonline.leedsmet.ac.uk which gives the clearest description of copyright issues around photography that I've come across. That is if there can be anything clear about it!

link

John K

Just thought to mention that stamps are also subject to similar copyright restrictions so you'd need to check with the issuing authority what their rules are about this. Generally old stamps may well be out of copyright but recent ones are likely to be covered still.

Mind, if the photo is purely for your own use to test a lens no-one else will know, but publishing them (including the WWW) would be likely to be a contravention unless you have an agreement to do so, much as with the banknotes.

There is more discussion about this on Wiki here: link

John K

If I were a dealer of bank notes selling on eBay I guess it would be worth my while to get the requisite authority from the BoE. I'm sure if you explained that purpose it wouldn't be an issue. Google ends up automatically caching whatever it finds with its web crawler; pretty useful for the BoE to help them find breaches.

John K

All I could see is a few obsolete ones.

Why resurrect a three year old thread?

John K

Nice friendly style and no distractions. Well done.

John K

Too much snow - match abandoned!