Excellent BW treatment - lots of contrast and drama.

No, just my opinion. We had already been told about the editing errors by others earlier in this thread.

Yes, I would crop out the ear entirely so that we concentrate on the expression and especially the eyes.

Really pleased to hear that you're enjoying the forum community and that you're also making great strides with your photography.

I especially like No 5, an excellent expression and spot on focus. Have you thought of doing a tighter crop on the left to remove the ear from the composition?

Yes indeed, but that isn't the point I'm making. Not everyone will want to have a go, but everyone will want to see what people have done. We need an original posting in this thread to give something any alternatives can be easily compared to.

If you don't want to, that's fine, but it will restrict the number of people who will want to try it out.

In essence this is a test, but a very very rough and imprecise one.

To test a lens properly you need a solid tripod and a detailed test target. A newspaper pinned to a wall is a good choice for measuring resolution and sharpness.

Something as desribed in your post is basically correct, but the items used are far too big. A line of dominoes arranged in a similat way would work better.

Not as such, but we have no idea what it'a all about at the moment. What I suggest is you post a straight copy of the original (no cropping, no sharpening, no adjustments of any kind) so that we can see what people then make of it.

Otherwise there is no way of knowing what has been achieved.

This would be more meaningful if you posted the original for everyone to see piotro. As it stands it's all a bit mysterious.

The guest editorial team have done a great job and I think they should be very proud of their first issue.

There are some errors, such as the rerpeated photo and also some other photos have been stretched giving them the wrong aspect ratio, but these are minor things when we look at the excellent overall quality.

PU magazine is a totally different beast to what it was 10 years ago and when you compare the old with the new the quality jump is just staggering. It's come a long way thanks to pete and his editorial team.

Welcome aboard - hope you enjoy being here!

Almost all macro lenses are great optics so I'm sure that you'll find one that suits. Don't forget there are lots of second hand manual focus Pentax ones that are very compact and just as good as the current AF ones. Very often manual focus is more convenient for many macro subjects.